“The pair stood in long silence. Another thing Eilidh missed. Humans rushed everywhere, filled every moment with noise. They lacked the discipline of quiet.”

“You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception. Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet where your wife and kid wait. Silence, not heaven, would be reward enough.”

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

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

“To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes - to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute. There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth -- and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.”

“I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise.”