And it was just in these unaccustomed impulses, evoked in the beings by their instrumental and vocal melodies, that the learned members of that group indicated what they wished to transmit.

She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind.

Just the minute another person is drawn into some one's life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fetes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardiness, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble, and many others, all of which are entirely foreign to the original urge and way off the subject.

Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist- after having observed, in addition to all the things already mentioned, a variety of organs, trumpets, fifes, stringed instruments, and even that little tongue of iron which is placed between the teeth and which makes strange use of the oral cavity for sounding box and of the breath for vehicle of sound when, I say, this man believed he had seen everything, he suddenly found himself once more plunged deeper into ignorance and bafflement than ever. For having captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its body, Or any other thing. At last be lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath; thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created be used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

"Now what is "music"–a sequence of vibrations in the air, or a succession of emotional responses in the brain?"

That which intoxicates, the sensually ecstatic, the sudden surprise, the urge to be profoundly stirred at any price — dreadful tendencies!

Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things

They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions; and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air.

..think about the contradictions and complexities that beset people.

Most of the contemporary beings acquire in their presence a very strange need to evoke the expression in others of the being-impulse 'astonishment' regarding themselves, or even simply to notice it on the faces of those around.

Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

Sounds weren't coming out of my mouth. And yet they were in my head, expressed, possibly, as something less exact, thought perhaps, though at the time they still seemed like sounds to me.

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.