“Father’s silence is not merely the absence of sound. It’s a creature with a life of its own. It chokes you. It pinches you small as a grain of rice. It twists in your gut like a worm. Silence clawed at my throat. It left a taste of burnt matches.”

“Have you ever heard silence? It is not a stillness which is the absence of sound. Silence is not empty, it is full of content. It is like the sky―intangible yet containing the stars, the sun, the moon, and all existence. That is silence and it is full of tongues.”

“The Silence took your friend."Nobody says What’s the Silence?Satan Says, "It is a creature that came out of the walm. Large as a lake, this creature,but it’s not made of water. It is made of sound. And it feeds off of sound, or anythingthat makes sound, or anything that can hear sound. It will empty this entire world ofsound if we let it. It claims this side of town its territory. Anybody that’s out on the streetis at risk. It will eat anything that it hears and your friend must have been something itheard. He will never come back. Nobody ever escapes from the stomach of Silence.”

“In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.”

“Love has a sound, if you know what to listen for. It sounds like silence, surrounded by blindness. It’s the Helen Keller of emotions, at least for me.”

“My hush is lush. It’s drunk on its own greenness, just as I’m drunk on my blue silence. What would you say if I asked you to turquoise?”