Noted: Pascal Quignard

From Pascal Quignard's The Roving Shadows (translation from the French by Chris Turner), chapter 5, page 19:

Whereas in the life that preceded daylight we were merely a passionate sense of hearing, we become, through birth, producers of sound.

Once we forsake sounds, once we neglect the injunction and the ear, once we break down everything into letters, we disobey.

Emerging into the light, choking in the air, we can raise our eyelids and see, we can lower our eyelids and interrupt our sight, we can breathe, we can expel through our mouths the language our mothers' mouths imperceptibly put into them.