“Wherever I go the music playing is always something I like. I never hear music I hate.""If you never hear it, how do you know what music you don't like?" I asked, not sure if I'd made any sense. It was spinny trying to figure it out. Didn't you know what you liked in contrast to what you didn't? But if he only heard music he liked, he'd never have any contrast. Did that mean he liked everything?”

“He didn't mean to corner me, but when you're as tall and wide as he is and I'm as little as I am, merely standing beside me constitutes menacement.”

“Would you like to press charges?" the officer asked. She was not serious. Nobody pressed charges against stars of A-stream teams, especially ones like Danders Anders who were in their final year and on the brink of superlative careers."I'd love to press charges," Rochelle answered. "That would be joyous."The officer grinned. "Wouldn't it?”

“My father is a liar and so am I.But I’m going to stop. I have to stop.I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions.That’s my promise.This time I truly mean it.”

“He said, “So . . . do you like music?” It was a pretty stupid question. I mean, who doesn’t like music? Okay, maybe some puritanical zealot out in Hicksville. But really. It was kind of like asking, “Do you like food?” “Isn’t oxygen great?” “Have you got skin? I do.” I knew what he meant, though.”

“I don't think that now: half of everything is something, not nothing. Lots of somethings”

“I am always hearing. . . the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.''No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.''But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries. . . . It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest.”