Quotes from Deborah Tannen

Psychologists John and Sandra Condry asked subjects to interpret why an infant was crying. If they had been told the baby was a boy, subjects thought he was angry, but if they had been told it was a girl, they thought she was afraid.

If I wrote, 'After delivering the acceptance speech, the candidate fainted,' you would know I was talking about a woman. Men do not faint; they pass out.

It is the interaction of the two styles - his withdrawal and her insistence that he tell her what she did wrong - that is devastating to both.

So there it is: Boys and girls grow up in different worlds, but we think we're in the same one, so we judge each other's behavior by the standards of our own.

One woman put it this way: "...I'm a compassionate person, but I also don't want to be friends with somebody who doesn't full show up as well.

Maybe most of all, Karl is like family because of how I feel when I'm around him: completely and unself-consciously myself.

Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy, and many men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.

You're so real. That's why we love you." ... Her friend's response reflected the reciprocity of showing vulnerability. It is a gift not only to the one who has the meltdown but also to the ones who witness it.

One reason it's so difficult to decide what to say became immediately clear: comments and questions that some appreciated were not appreciated by others.

If my colleague's reaction is typical, imagine how often women who think they are displaying a positive quality—connection— are misjudged by men who perceive them as revealing a lack of independence, which the men regard as synonymous with incompetence and insecurity.

The danger of misinterpretation is greatest, of course, among speakers who actually speak different native tongues, or come from different cultural backgrounds, because cultural difference necessarily implies different assumptions about natural and obvious ways to be polite.

Linguist Robin Lakoff devised another set of rules that describe the motivations behind politeness—that is, how we adjust what we say to take into account its effects on others. Here they are as Lakoff presents them: 1. Don't impose; keep your distance. 2. Give options; let the other person have a say. 3. Be friendly; maintain camaraderie.

We are more likely to respond according to our habits than to the specifics of the situation.

The characteristics of a good man and a good candidate are the same, but a woman has to choose between coming across as a strong leader or a good woman. If a man appears forceful, logical, direct, masterful, and powerful, he enhances his value as a man. If a woman appears forceful, logical, direct, masterful, or powerful, she risks undercutting her value as a woman.

the platitude "If you love each other, you can work it out" is not necessarily true. Instead, the more you love each other, the more unrealistic your expectations of perfect understanding, and the more painful the metamessage of misunderstanding. And that, in turn, is why so many people, finding that they can't work it out, conclude that they don't—or even less logically, never did—love each other.

I'll just be a memory," he says. "There are so many people who were so real to me in their lives, and now they're just memories.

In all my memories, my father is unfailingly cheerful. It's my mother who is often unhappy, whose unhappiness I dread because I absorb it, as if I were a lightning rod grounding her sadness in my chest. When

Throughout everything, my father's cheerfulness, his optimism, is palpable in his ever-present sense of humor. Yet I'm struck by a comment he makes in a conversation with Ryan: "If there is no humor, you find sadness. Sadness appears. No humor isn't followed by nothing. It's followed by sadness." I see in his journals and written memories that my father's perennial good humor and quick wit may be a cover for his sadness, which reminds me of my own.

We all have alternate lives we might have lived had we made different decisions, including decisions about whom to marry. I

These are the signals that combine with what is said to make up the devices we use to show we're listening, interested, sympathetic, or teasing—and that we're the right sort of people.

This has been one of my biggest surprises in writing this book: the distinction beetween introverts and extraverts did not come up in any of my previous books about relationships, but it emerged early on a significant factor in this one.

a girl who posts a picture of herself on Instagram must show that she doesn't take herself too seriously, either by mugging or with a self-deprecating or humorous caption or, preferably, both.

Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience— both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others. This is especially true in the family— and our history of family talk is like a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted.

The very next year the Statue of Liberty lowered her torch: in 1921 Congress imposed quotas, and in 1924—the year after my mother arrived—quotas were set so low that the doors effectively slammed shut.