Keith M

“O’Reilly passed a table where Gerry Shanks was telling a joke to his friends. Gerry nodded to O’Reilly but didn’t break his stride. “… so there’s your mountaineer man on a ledge a hundred feet down, both arms broken, and this other climber higher up throws him down a rope and says he, ‘Grab you on til that there with your teeth and I’ll get you up here, so I will.’” O’Reilly saw the grins on the men’s faces, heard their chuckles already beginning. Gerry had a reputation as a storyteller. “So the one at the top starts pulling away and pulling away.” Gerry accompanied his words with the motions of a man hauling hand over hand on a rope. “He’s working like blue blazes.” O’Reilly had to hear the punch line. “And then, as your other man’s head appears level with the safe ground, the one pulling gasps, takes a big deep breath, and says, ‘Are you all right, Paddy?’ “‘I aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam,’ says Paddy,” and as Gerry spoke he let his voice fall from a yell to a whisper.”
― Patrick Taylor, An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War

“Reading is a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act, enriched as much by the unpredictable indirections of a reader’s inferences and thoughts, as by the direct message to the eye from the text.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

“Modern existence is a propped-up life built entirely on noise, artificiality, and the tragic rejection of God. From revolutions to conquests, from ideologies to political battles, from the frantic quest for equality to the obsessive cult of progress, silence is impossible. What is worse: transparent societies are sworn to an implacable hatred of silence, which they regard as a contemptible, backward defeat.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise