Limitations can be hugely creative and hugely inspiring - so long as they are the ones you choose for yourself.

Like how stars might sound. Or moons But not mountains. Too floaty for mountains. It's a sound like one planet singing to another, high stretched and full of different voices starting at different notes and sloping down to other different notes but all weaving together in a rope of sound that's sad but not sad and slow but not slow and all singing one word. One word.

And I look at her sitting there and she looks across the river and we wait as the dawn fully arrives, each of us knowing. Each of us knowing the other.

A thing worth learning is worth learning well.

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don’t remember nothing, don’t remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone’s ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it’s true, but who knows?

No," I say firmly. "If you ever doubt anything here, if you ever not know what to think or who to trust, you trust Todd, okay? You remember that.

It was solitude, but it was solitude that wasn't lonely. Solitude that could sort things out. And he hadn't had that in ages.