“Boredom is fear's patience. Fear doesn't want to exaggerate. Only on occasion--and fear considers this very important--does it want to know how things stand with me.”

“I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.”

“I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm...”

“No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when...”

“To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.”

“I was all too aware that there's an unspoken law that you should never start to cry if you have too many reasons to do so. I told myself that my tears were due tot he cold, and I believed myself.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“I collect words--they are sweets in the mouth of sound.”

“Sometimes, when people speak, I cease listening to their words and zoom in instead on the cadence, and it can seem lovely, and at other times absurd, all this verbiage, these seemingly random conso...”

“By its definition, sound is interactive. It is you connecting with the frequency of something greater or richer through hearing. Likewise, when your sound goes out, you can no longer hear the sound...”