“It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

“No one lacks voice. Not even the dead. But many lack ears, the ability to hear those stories out of which the most destitute of people are forging their destines, breathing life into bleached bones. ”

“My story is the story of forgotten people and the voice of the voiceless.”

“Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.”

“The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.”