Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.

Everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.

The people made their recollections fit in with their sufferings

Every sound comes into my ears dirty because you've heard it on the way

But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable.

For I have known them all already,known them all.
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall,
Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?

Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.

I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.

Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am.

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

Sometimes you could see the scars and sometimes you couldn’t. But everybody had them.

Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That's how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.

Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.