“I suppose all this sounds very crazy — all these terrible emotions always do sound foolish when we put them into our inadequate words. They are not meant to be spoken — only felt and endured.”

“The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words.”

“In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.”

“I told her I loved the howling sound of her harmonica. That seemed to be the limit of my courage that night, and even those spoken words had to struggle their way out of my mouth. It's all very well for words to build bridges, but sometimes I think it's a matter of knowing when to do it. Knowing when the time's right.”

“Mañana will always mean mañana. But for my first few months in Zacatecas, that was all I heard- mañana. It was a lovely sounding word and I began to think that it probably meant "heaven.”

“There is no proof, but they all sense it. They are all geniuses that appear once in a decade. The only ones that can counter such overwhelming talents one-on-one are the Generation of Miracles alone. Players who are on the same level as them don't exist, even if they do appear, they'll be in a very distant future. That was how it was suppose to be. What they heard was the sound of the gate - the sound of the gate that only extraordinary geniuses can enter - being forced open.”