Reading at sentence level

This looks promising! It holds my attention.

I must slowly re-read this.

No big deal but, this sentence caught my eye:

"I followed the quieted sounds in the rooms ahead. "

I question it, grammatically.

Perhaps, "I followed the faint sounds from the rooms ahead."

The sounds are faint to the listener, but no one has "quieted" them in a transitive sense.

The sounds come FROM the rooms ahead.

The hearer is not IN the rooms ahead, following the sounds.

They say DeLillo rewrites a sentence or paragraph anywhere from 10 to 50 times and keeps all the versions in notebooks, which he eventually sells to archives.

And this sentence:

The actually adult, imperious attendees eyed me with reproach.

Perhaps you might try:

The real adults in attendance imperiously eyed me with reproach.