“We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.”

“The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.”

“We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.”

“Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.”

“A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.”

“I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be ”

“Weir heard something different in the sounds. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins. The empty ones were sonorous, the fuller ones provided an ascending scale. Those filled to the brim produced only a fat percussive beat unless they overbalanced, when the cascade would give a loud variation. Within earshot there were scores of tins in different states of fullness and with varying resonance. Then he heard the wire moving in the wind. It set up a moaning background noise that would occasionally gust into prominence, then lapse again to mere accompaniment. He had to work hard to discern, or perhaps imagine, a melody in this tin music, but it was better in his ears than the awful sound of shellfire.”