“By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping, and finally achieved a device that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface - a wall, a floor, even the speaker's own cheek or forehead.”

“He had a voice you couldn't miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.”

“The sound of words as they're said is always different from the sound they make when they're heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside.”

“That," he whispered, "is unthinkable." In Mosca’s experience, such statements generally meant that a thing was perfectly thinkable, but that the speaker did not want to think it.”

“I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.”

“The great improvement of the radio over the telephone is that it may be turned off without offending the speaker.”