“We hear the ambient noise of children singing. We hear lions and tigers roar. Hyenas laugh. Some jungle bird or howler monkey declares its existence, screeching a maniac's gibberish. Our entire world, always doing battle against the silence and obscurity of death.”

“He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.”

“A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena's growl to be a lion's; but when he hears the lion's growl, he knows damn well it's a lion.”

“We who live in the civilized world are accustomed to a background roar that never goes away. It is the pounding of our machinery in the chest of the city, and it is the incessant blood of traffic rushing through the streets.Here the silence never goes away. It is the foundation of all sound. One can hear into the jungle through the silence much farther than one can see into it through the trees.”

“We must learn to soundproof the heart against the intruding noises of the public world in order to hear what God has to say.”

“Children live in a world of dreams and imagination, a world of aliveness… There is a voice of wonder and amazement inside all of us; but we grow to realize we can no longer hear it, and we live in silence. It isn’t that God stopped speaking; it is that our lives became louder.”