“I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”

“Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rudeAnd fled to the silence of sweet solitude.”

“I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”

“I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”

“Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence. Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken.”

“The room was filled with a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence...”