Radio Silence Quotes

I wonder- if nobody is listening to my voice, am I making any sound at all?

And I’m platonically in love with you.” “That was literally the boy-girl version of ‘no homo’, but I appreciate the sentiment.

Everyone's different inside their head.

Hello. I hope somebody is listening.

I wish I could be as subtle and beautiful. All I know how to do is scream.

Being clever was, after all, my primary source of self-esteem. I’m a very sad person, in all senses of the word, but at least I was going to get into university.

Sometimes i think if nobody spoke to me, i'd never speak again.

I think everyone’s a bit bored with boy-girl romances anyway,” he said. “I think the world’s had enough of those, to be honest.

Everything's better under the stars, I suppose. If we get another life after we die, I'll meet you there, old sport...

Love. Not the kind you see in the movies or hear about on the radio. The real kind. The kind that gets beaten down and bloody, yet perseveres. The kind that hopes even when hope seems foolish. The kind that can forgive. The kind that believes in healing. The kind that can sit in silence and feel renewed. The real kind of love. It's rare and we have it...

He smiled and looked away. 'Sometimes I think we're the same person...but we just got accidentally split into two before we were born.

I couldn’t quite believe how much I seriously loved Aled Last, even if it wasn’t in the ideal way that would make it socially acceptable for us to live together until we die.

There's something nice about the silence of a car ride in the dark, going home. When you were tired of the radio and conversation, and it was okay to just be alone with your thoughts and the road ahead. If you're that comfortable with someone, you don't have to talk.

I wonder sometimes whether you've exploded already, like a star, and what I'm seeing you is three million years into the past, and you're not here anyore. How can we be together here, now, when you are so far away. When you are so far ago? I'm shouting so loudly, but you never turn around to see me. Perhaps it is I who have already exploded. Either way, we are going to bring beautiful things into the universe.

This is real, this is me,' I said. She blinked. 'Did you just quote Camp Rock at me? That's not very pop punk." 'I've gotta go my own way.' 'Okay, firstly, that's High School Musical...

People move on quicker than I can comprehend. People forget you within days, they take new pictures to put on Facebook and they don't read your messages. They keep on moving forward and shove you to the side because you make more mistakes than you should.

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

It must be useful to be smart," she said and then laughed weakly. She glanced down and suddenly looked very sad. "I'm like, constantly scared I'm going to be a homeless or something. I wish our whole lives didn't have to depend on our grades.

Bedrooms are windows to the soul.

I wonder – if nobody is listening to my voice, am I making any sound at all?

I stopped speaking. There was no point trying to argue. There was no way she was going to even attempt to listen to me. They never do, do they? They never even try to listen to you.

Sometimes you can't say the things you're thinking. Sometimes it's too hard.

...it felt like we were friends. Friends who barely knew anything about each other except the other's most private secret.

Every time I thought I’d worked out what I really enjoyed, I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I just didn’t enjoy anything anymore.

You're an idiot,' said Mum, when I relayed to her the entire situation on Wednesday. 'Not an unintelligent idiot, but a sort of naive idiot who manages to fall into a difficult situation and then can't get out out of it because she's too awkward.

i'm platonically in love with you

Hello, I hope somebody is listening...If nobody is listening, am I making any sound at all?

I don’t think age has much to do with adulthood.

You probably think Aled Last and I are going to fall in love or something. Since he is a boy and I am a girl. I just wanted to say- we don't. That's all.

I'm as lost as ever, friends. Can you tell? I'd like it if someone were to rescue me soon. Oh, I'd like that very much. I'd like that. I'd like that very much indeed.

I got four A grades [...] I expected to be happy about it. I expected to be jumping up and down and crying from joy. But I didn't feel any of that. It just wasn't disappointment.

I'd listen to you for hours.

Are you wearing that?' he [Daniel] said. I looked down. I was wearing my batman onesie. 'Yes,' I said, 'Problem?' 'So many,' he said, turning around. 'So many problems.

I can take a little beating now and then. I’m a tough one. I’m a star. I’m steel-chested and diamond-eyed. Cyborgs live and then they break, but I’ll never break. Even when my bone dust drifts over the City walls, I’ll be living and I’ll be flying, and I will wave and laugh.

I'm sure you think I was complaining about nothing. You probably think I'm a whiny teenager. And yeah, it was all in my head, probably. That doesn't mean it wasn't real. So fuck you all.

Family means nothing,” she said, and I knew she believed it. “You have no obligation to love your family. It wasn’t your choice to be born.

It'd take hours to explain," I said. "I'd listen to you for hours," he said.

I kept peeling off layers of my personality, but I seemed to be going in circles. Every time I thought I’d worked out what I really enjoyed, I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I just didn’t enjoy anything any more.

how many miserable young people does it take to change a light bulb. please, i am serious, i have been sitting in the dark for 2 weeks

Radio's trapped in Universe City. And someone's finally heard him. Someone is going to rescue him.

I don't know. I think I did my best." Raine looked at me for a moment. "Well... that's good? That's all you can do.

Mum was in the lounge in her unicorn onesie watching Game of Thrones.

My reasoning was that since there was no easy way to bring this up, I might as well just blurt it out. This is how I get through most of my life.

[…] When you get to this age, you realize that you’re not anyone special after all.

What does total androgyny look like, when gender isn't even anything to do with appearance and voice?

You deserve better friends,' she said. 'You’re a sunshine angel.

It took quite a lot of effort not to say sorry for saying sorry.

Does anyone have any tips for avoiding sinking into the concrete?

I wasn’t sure how anyone could mistake an Indian girl for a British-Ethiopian girl, but there it is. Gotta love white people.

The stars are always on your side.

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

which is pretty pathetic, to be honest. which is what i am. i shouldn't be surprised at myself.

I punched her in the face and she got a nosebleed and cried. An accurate metaphor for most of my past friendships.

Okay, it's like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening. You read the paper, or if you're into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you'll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching. And you know, it's got so bad that I've started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half the time they're watching TV. Or if you've got some romance in a movie? What to they do but go to a movie? All those people, Marlin," he invited the interviewer in with a nod. "What are they watching?" After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, "You tell us, Kevin." "People like me.

You probably think Aled Last and I are going to fall in love because he is a boy and I am a girl. I just wanted to say. We don't

i felt a glow at the knowledge that she was happy

when you’ve got a lot going on, you have to look at the bigger picture. Just take a step back and look at the big picture and think about what’s really important at this moment in time.

I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.

Lachlain and Emma: 'So you expect us to sit in this enclosed compartment the entire way in silence?' 'Of course not.' She clicked on the radio.

A radio was playing quietly. Nobody was listening. It was there to drown out the silence.

Why did I do this? Why am I like this?

To whoever loves me next, I’m sorry if I’m afraid of you or if days of flirting turn to radio silence, without warning. I’m sorry if I make you say the words over and over and over until I believe them. (I’m sorry if I don’t believe them.) I will probably spend more time worrying about losing you than I spend trying to keep you. Trouble is, every single time I’ve ever thought something was too good to be true– I’ve been right. Understand, I will know how to be vulnerable with you, but I won’t know how not to regret it. And I have no idea how deep we’ll be into this relationship before I admit I’ve never done this before. Not really. Not in any way that counts. Before I admit that I know how to put my body inside someone else’s but not how to make it beautiful. I probably won’t be easy to love. Too many people loved me badly, I’m not sure I know how to do it right.

It didn´t take a lot for me to believe that I was disappointing...

[…] And to be honest I wished I could do the same, just go home when I wanted to, but I couldn’t, because I’m too scared to do what I want.

We were so important to each other. We'd tell each other everything and anything. We were each other's first everything. First and only everything.

I didn't want to be in a bad mood in my history exam. Writing about the division of Germany for two hours was sad enough.

So who's the strange one?" I grinned. "I don't know," he said, and then shrugged. "Sometimes I think if nobody spoke to me, I'd never speak again." "That sounds sad." He blinked. "Oh, yeah.

Sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep-bound town, the doctor turned on his radio before going to bed for the few hours’ sleep he allowed himself. And from the ends of the earth, across the thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering that he cannot see.

I got in my car and started it up and sighed. The radio station was about to do some Bartok crap and I couldn’t stand that atonal stuff, so I flipped it off. I’d rather head back to my place in silence.

The Couple Overfloweth We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? . . . That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad. (Negotiations)

YOU’RE AN IDIOT,” said Mum, when I relayed to her the entire situation on Wednesday. “Not an unintelligent idiot, but a sort of naive idiot who manages to fall into a difficult situation and then can’t get out of it because she’s too awkward.

She was everything I wasn't - she was drama, emotion, intrigue, power. I was nothing. Nothing happened to me.

I wanted so badly to ask him. But that's the one thing you can't just ask. You've just got to wait until they tell you.

Are you crying? Oh, wow, I sound like Wendy from Peter Pan.' His eyes blurred momentarily before looking at me again. 'Girl, why are you crying?

We'd found him. We'd helped him. We'd rescued him – we hoped.

I didn’t really want to go. Firstly, everyone was just gonna get drunk, which I could do perfectly well by myself in my den while watching YouTube videos instead of having to worry about catching the last train home or avoiding sexual assault.

Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jutjawed silence both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we can't communicate them anymore and if we tried it would take a million years and a billion books ― Too late, too late, the history of everything we've seen together and separately has become a library in itself ― The shelves pile higher ― They're full of misty documents or documents of the Mist - The mind has convoluted in every tuckaway every whichaway tuckered hole till there's no more the expressing of our latest thoughts let alone the old.

[…] I think by now, February, we’ve, as they say, ‘lost touch’. Not that we ever touched in the first place. In the end I’m still only ever looking where you’ve looked, I’m only ever walking where you’ve walked, I’m in your dark blue shadow and you never seem to turn around to find me there. I wonder sometimes whether you’ve exploded already, like a star, and what I’m seeing is you three million years into the past, and you’re not here any more. How can we be together here, now, when you are so far away? When you are so far ago? I’m shouting so loudly, but you never turn around to see me. Perhaps it is I who have already exploded. Either way, we are going to bring beautiful things into the universe. […]

But I’d already started running—no, sprinting toward the trees across the grass, the rain already heavy enough that it kept stinging my eyes, Brian galloping along beside me. After a moment I could hear Aled running too, and I glanced behind me and stretched out my arm to him and cried, “Come along!” and he did; he reached out and took my hand and we ran like that through the countryside in the rain, and then he laughed, and it reminded me of a child’s laugh, and I wished people could always laugh and run like that.

And I was so...I thought I was so smart. I thought I was the smartest person in the whole world." He shook his head. "But now...I'm just...when you get to this age, you realise that you're not anyone special after all.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

I decided to make spaghetti for lunch again. Not that I was the least bit hungry. But I couldn't just go on sitting on the sofa, waiting for the phone to ring. I had to move my body, to begin working toward some goal. I put water in a pot, turned on the gas, and until it boiled I would make tomato sauce while listening to an FM broadcast. The radio was playing an unaccompanied violin sonata by Bach. The performance itself was excellent, but there was something annoying about it. I didn't know whether this was the fault of the violinist or of my own present state of mind, but I turned off the music and went on cooking in silence. I heated the olive oil, put garlic in the pan, and added minced onions. When these began to brown, I added the tomatoes that I had chopped and strained. It was good to be cutting things and frying things like this. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that I could feel in my hands. I liked the sounds and the smells.

The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence.

I feel a bit like a BOT18 sometimes. Old and rusty, aching and sleepy. Wandering through the city, lost, circling, alone. No gears left in my heart, no code whirring in my brain. Just kinetic energy, being pushed gently onward by other forces—sound, light, dust waves, the quakes. I'm as lost as ever, friends. Can you tell? I'd like it if someone were to rescue me soon. Oh, I'd like that very much. I’d like that. I'd like that very much indeed.

He knew I was gay for ages," he said, his voice soft. "We both did. Since we were, like, ten or eleven, maybe. As soon as we understood what gay was, we knew that's what I was. We... We used to kiss sometimes, when we were kids. When we were alone. Just little childish kisses, little pecks on the lips because we thought it was fun. We were always... really affectionate with each other. We'd cuddle and... we were kind to each other, rather than nasty like most children. I think we were so caught up in each other that we just... missed all the heteronormative propaganda that's thrust at you when you're that age. We didn't really realize it was weird until - yeah, until we were ten or eleven. But that didn't really stop us. I guess... I guess I always felt like it was more romantic than Aled did. Aled always just treated it like it was something that friends did rather than boyfriends. Aled... he's always been weird. He doesn't care what people think. He doesn't even, like, register the social norms... he's just caught up in his own little world.

Well... the thing is... I don't actually think I care about English literature. I don't want to do it at university." Aled looked startled. "Don't you?" "I'm not sure I want to go at all." "But... that was -That was what you cared about more than anything." "Only because I thought I had to." I said. "And because I was good at it. I thought that was the only was I was going to have a good life. But... that's wrong.

We need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they're silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it's new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we're saying while we're saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean.

Sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep bound town, the doctor turned on his radio before going to bed for the few hours' sleep he allowed himself. And from the ends of the earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in the suffering that he cannot see. "Oran! Oran!" In vain the call rang over oceans, in vain Rieux listened hopefully; always the tide of eloquence began to flow, bringing home still more the unbridgeable gulf that lay between Grand and the speaker. "Oran, we're with you!" they called emotionally. But not, the doctor told himself, to love or to die together-- and that's the only way...

And I was so... I thought I was so smart. I thought I was the smartest person in the whole world.' He shook his head. 'But now...I'm just... when you get to this age, you realize that you're not anyone special after all.' He was right. I wasn't special. 'It's ... all I've got,' he said. 'This is the only special thing about me.

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

Practicing silence means making a commitment to take a certain amount of time to simply Be. Experiencing silence means periodically withdrawing from the activity of speech. It also means periodically withdrawing from such activities as watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a book. If you never give yourself the opportunity to experience silence, this creates turbulence in your internal dialogue.

Hannah leaned forward and reached for the dial. The radio hissed, shrieked and blasted a few bars of Mozart before finally settling on Radiohead’s Exit Music (for a Film). Hannah, delighted with her discovery, smiled and slumped back in her seat. She listened to Thom Yorke’s nasally vocals in silence for a couple of verses before joining in. Singing heartily and drumming away on her knees, she was like a ball of energy, and already I felt this energy permeating my own body. I felt as fresh and as happy as I’d been in months. Radiohead ended and became The Stone Roses, who in turn became The Killers. Finally, when they became the hourly news, Hannah rolled her eyes and turned off the radio.

When I said I wasn’t with another girl the January after we fell in love for the 3rd time, it’s because it wasn’t actual sex. In the February that began our radio silence, it was actual sex. I hate the tight shirts that go below your waistline. Not only do they make you look too young, but then your torso is a giraffe’s neck attached to tiny legs. I screamed at myself in the subway for writing poems about you still. I made a scene. I think about you almost each morning, and roughly every five days, I still believe you’re there. I still masturbate to you. When we got really bad, I would put another coat of mop water on the floor of the bar to make sure you were asleep when I got to my side of the bed. You are the only person to whom I’ve lied, knowing I was telling the truth. I miss the way your neck wraps around my face like a cave we are both lost in. I remember when you said being with me is like being alone with company. My friend Sarah wrote a poem about pink ponies. I’m scared you’re my pink pony. Hers is dead. It is really sad. You’re not dead. You live in Ohio, or Washington, or Wherever. You are a shadow my body leaves on other girls. I have a growing queue of things I know will make you laugh and I don’t know where to put them. I mourn like you’re dead. If you had asked me to stay, I would not have said no. It would never mean yes.

Most of us have so few moments like that in our lives. There’s noise everywhere. There are some places we can’t even escape it. Television and radio are probably the worst culprits. They are very seductive. It’s so tempting for some people to turn on the television set or the radio when they first walk into a room or get in the car… to fill any space with noise. I wonder what some people are afraid might happen in the silence. Some of us must have forgotten how nourishing silence can be. That kind of solitude goes by many names. It may be called “meditation” or “deep relaxation,” “quiet time” or “downtime.” In some circles, it may even be criticized as “daydreaming.” Whatever it’s called, it’s a time away from outside stimulation, during which inner turbulence can settle, and we have a chance to become more familiar with ourselves.

In our household doubts more troubling than these were suffered in silence. The spiritual void I have seen in so many of Istanbul's rich, Westernised, secularist families is evident in these silences. Everyone talks openly about mathematics, success at school, football and having fun, but they grapple with the most basic questions of existence - love,compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred - in trembling confusion and painful solitude. They light a cigarette, give their attention to the music on the radio, return wordlessly to their inner worlds.

There’s nothing to be scared of.” Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse – there was really no point – he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how the ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing ‘Come Fly with Me’ from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes.

Sometimes quiet is violent I find it hard to hide it My pride is no longer inside It's on my sleeve My skin will scream reminding me of Who I killed inside my dream I hate this car that I'm driving There's no hiding for me I'm forced to deal with what I feel There is no distraction to mask what is real I could pull the steering wheel I have these thoughts, so often I ought To replace that slot with what I once bought 'Cause somebody stole my car radio And now I just sit in silence I ponder of something terrifying 'Cause this time there's no sound to hide behind I find over the course of our human existence One thing consists of consistence And it's that we're all battling fear Oh dear, I don't know if we know why we're here Oh my, too deep, please stop thinking I liked it better when my car had sound There are things we can do But from the things that work there are only two And from the two that we choose to do Peace will win and fear will lose It is faith and there's sleep We need to pick one please because Faith is to be awake And to be awake is for us to think And for us to think is to be alive And I will try with every rhyme To come across like I am dying To let you know you need to try to think I have these thoughts, so often I ought To replace that slot with what I once bought 'Cause somebody stole my car radio And now I just sit in silence

While walking, for example, if we are talking or thinking at the same time, we get caught up in the conversation or thoughts we’re having and get lost in the past or the future, our worries or our projects. People can easily spend their entire lives doing just that. What a tragic waste! Let us instead really live these moments that are given to us. In order to be able to live our life, we have to stop that radio inside, turn off our internal discourse. How can we enjoy our steps if our attention is given over to all that mental chatter? It’s important to become aware of what we feel, not just what we think. When we touch the ground with our foot, we should be able to feel our foot making contact with the ground. When we do this, we can feel a lot of joy in just being able to walk. When we walk, we can invest all our body and mind into our steps and be fully concentrated in each precious moment of life. In focusing on that contact with the earth, we stop being dragged around by our thoughts and begin to experience our body and our environment in a wholly different way. Our body is a wonder! Its functioning is the result of millions of processes. We can fully appreciate this only if we stop our constant thinking and have enough mindfulness and concentration to be in touch with the wonders of our body, the Earth, and the sky.

Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here. ("New York Blues")

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.