“My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.”

“My sounds [crying] were small and muffled but obvious. No one paid any attention. It was the way we had become. In a world full of sorrows, this was only one more.”

“If I could record them and transmit them to the present age, they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds other than what they actually were, and from what their phonographic labels pretended they were – since it's in ourselves that the silence exists. It was while the sounds were still mysterious that it would have been really interesting to render the mystery palpable and transferable.”

“I had no weapons. No plan. Nothing but my blood and my hands. They were coming, and there were more of them than I'd realized.”

“Neither one of them could turn off their feelings, even with so much time and distance between them. The more they were apart, and the more they weren't allowed to be together, the more they loved each other.”

“The world is full of people who want to play it safe, people who have tremendous potential but never use it. Somewhere deep inside them, they know that they could do more in life, be more, and have more -- if only they were willing to take a few risks.”