Echo Command Without Quotes & Sayings

This was my mother's chosen disciplinary method: unable to strike us, she ordered us to seal our lips. Some echo, no doubt, of the great silence with which her own mother had tormented Aadam Aziz lingered in her ears - because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound - and with an emphatic "Chup!" she would place a finger across her lips and command our tongues to be still. — Salman Rushdie

Now, though, the command he gave made two vaguenesses congeal into one threat, distant, amorphous, but unmistakable, as when, against a background of city dawn and back alley clatter, one click and one clack come together into the telltale click-clack of a ready gun, and echo won't tell you whether the enemy's perch is left, or right, or high, or low, only that it is near. — Ada Palmer