"Listening atheletically, with one's whole attention, one hears the words, the sighs, the sniffling, the loud exhaltations, the one-best-longer-than

normal pause before a difficult or taboo word, the voice-falls of misgiving, the piled ingots of guilt, the quiet screeching of self-blame, the breathlessness of fear, the restless volcano of panic, the fumings of stifled rage, the staccato spasms of frustration, the sidestepping anger of the "yes, but" -ers, the tumbling ideas of the developmentally disabled, the magic dramas of the hallucinatory, the idea shards of the psychotic, the harrowed tones of the battered, the bleak deadpan of the hopeless, the pacing of the ambivalent, the entrenched gloom of depression, the distant recesses of loneliness, the anxiousness that is like a wringing of the hands."
~ Diane Ackerman, The Slender Thread