The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering
aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days,
you can hear their chorus rushing past: I was a beautiful girl, please don’t go,
I too believe my body is made of glass, I’ve never loved anyone, I think of
myself as funny, forgive me… There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a
piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their
destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but
people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being
overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by
someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often
small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.
The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say
it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the
still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started
by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a
girl who left for America. When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough
string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the
vastness, the telephone was invented. Sometimes no length of string is long
enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can
do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.”

— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love