How we cite our quotes: (Chapter, Paragraph)
Quote #1
It's a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that's what gets lost in all that Noise. (2.4)
So the thing about Noise is that it confuses people, making them feel lost because they can't be alone with their thoughts. Talk about not feeling like an individual. Ben teaches Todd a trick that will help him keep his own self together. It's like a meditation exercise: He has to focus on who he is so that he can keep his own thoughts separate from everyone else's.
Quote #2
Cuz you can lie in the Noise, even when everyone knows what yer thinking, you can bury stuff under other stuff, you can hide it in plain sight, you just don't think it clearly or you convince yerself that the opposite of what yer hiding is true and then who'se going to be able to pick out from the flood what's real water and what's not going to get you wet? (2.21)
Here's another powerful image of how the Noise makes people feel lost in a shuffle. Because everything is so jumbled together, people can lose their sense of identity, hiding themselves in everybody else's messy thoughts. If they do this, they lie to themselves about who they are, using the chaos of society as an excuse.
Quote #3
It was my ma and pa who raised sheep on the next farm over from Ben and Cillian growing wheat and it was all friendly and nice and the sun never set and men and women sang songs together and lived and loved and never got sick and never never died. (3.42)
Talk about an ideal image. Before things got bad in the New World, men and women lived together and were happy in a world where everyone got along. There wasn't a struggle between the individual and society, and society didn't threaten the individual because everyone was respected.