A turn of phrase that shows David Simon to be literary:

'…you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead.'

"Speak for the dead' made it into the show as dialogue, but not, I think, 'the theft of a human life', which is a striking way of making 'taking of a life' sound out more slowly.

With Simon, one expects this to be given an economic reading sooner or later.

I don't like being this room's temperature.

'I can't speak for…' a person, someone else, but likely someone I know, even someone I may know quite well.

But 'I don't speak for…' an institution, a profession, a party, a group, unless they've said so; nominated, elected, chosen me.

(Yet it is more likely 'I can't speak for all…' than 'I don't speak for all…'. The former evinces awareness of a representative potential in what one will say. The latter denies a presumed representative power, in some cases to claim a more partial but still representative one.)

Speaking up; speaking out; speaking out of turn.

Speaking for oneself; speaking for myself; speak for yourself; I think I speak for all of us when I say; he speaks for all of us.

Voice; calling out; calling out to you; calling you out; calling on you; calling upon you all.

Voice; having a voice; having a say.

Finding your voice; having your say.

Pirate Prentice's 'Firm', i.e. the Special Operations Executive (a successor to Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6), is the earliest They in Gravity's Rainbow.

Late in the book, when he finds he still works for the Firm, as a 'double agent'—for '… no one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history—and no one ever will'—Pirate begins to cry:

'… he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem.'

OK, Herder, this sentence has eight exclamation points in it. And not all at the end!

Herder uses so many exclamation points!