“We who live in the civilized world are accustomed to a background roar that never goes away. It is the pounding of our machinery in the chest of the city, and it is the incessant blood of traffic rushing through the streets.Here the silence never goes away. It is the foundation of all sound. One can hear into the jungle through the silence much farther than one can see into it through the trees.”

“There before me, staring back from bottomless blackness, was I without my self. On all fours, I stared into my eyes. I came closer, and we kissed. Who knows me best? I am only water.”

“But no one knows anything about you, and Washington keeps telling everyone you are what you say you are. That's impossible. No one here is what they say they are.”

“She was the dawn and the sea and the sky, and every color ever seen by every sailor ever sailed.McBeth Johnson, the day he fell in love.”

“sweating like demons they scream through our speakers, but we leave the sound on cuz silence is harder and no one's the killer and no one's the martyr. The world that has made us can no longer contain us.”

“Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.”

“What you people who weren't yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization - sleep was different everywhere...”