“The night seemed suddenly defiled by the absence of music, as if the silence itself was injecting a sickness that only another song could cure.”

“Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple.”

“As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.”

“Then the silence came back, that awful silence that seemed to just take over.In that silence I kept hearing what I had said--heard it repeating itself over and over again like a stuck record. I wanted it to stop. I didn't want to say things like that anymore. I was sick of that kind of lying. I wished I could say something real.But the silence was too big.”

“The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.”

“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.”