Quotes from Deborah Tannen

the metamessage yields heart meaning.

Thus conversational signals can get crossed when well-intentioned speakers have different habits and expectations about using pacing and pausing, loudness, and pitch to show their intentions through talk—

Our deepest wish is to be understood and approved of by our mothers and our daughters. We can get closer to that goal by listening to the ways we talk to each other, and by learning to talk to each other in new ways.

IT'S 1996; MY father is eighty-eight. I arrive for a visit at their Westchester condo. My mother greets me at the door. After we've hugged and kissed, my father appears at the end of the hallway. It's taken him longer to rise from his chair. He isn't carrying the cane he finally agreed to use after his last fall. He stumbles, but the wall catches him. Something inside me rebels: who stole my father and put this old man in his place?

During that year, 2017, according to FBI statistics, 60 percent of religious hate crimes were anti-Jewish (17 percent were anti-Islamic and 5 percent anti-Catholic).

Smashing heads does not open minds.

A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity--a ratification of one's way of being human and one's way in the world.

We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation — or a relationship.

A woman will be inclined to repeat a request that doesn't get a response because she is convinced that her husband would do what she asks, if he only understood that she really wants him to do it. But a man who wants to avoid feeling that he is following orders may instinctively wait before doing what she asked, in order to imagine that he is doing it of his own free will.

One man commented that he and I seemed to have different definitions of gossip. He said, 'To you it seems to be discussion of personal details about people known to the conversationalists. To me, it's a discussion of the weaknesses, character flaws, and failures of third persons, so that the participants in the conversation can feel superior to them. This seems unworthy, hence gossip is bad.

At every age, the girls and women sit closer to each other and look at each other directly. At every age, the boys and men sit at angles to each other—in one case, almost parallel—and never look directly into each other's faces.

Both women and men could benefit from learning each other's styles. 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.

We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.

Knowing that somewhere in the world there is someone who cares what you wore, an insignificant detail of your life that would seem unimportant to anyone else, makes you feel more connected to that person and less alone in the world.

It's important to remember that others' ways of talking to you are partly a reaction to your style, just as your style with them is partly a reaction to their style—with you.

While boys create connections through friendly competition, girls create connections by downplaying competition and focusing on similarities.

Often, focusing on the words spoken precludes figuring out what sparked a crisis, because the culprits are not words but tone of voice, intonation, and unstated implications and assumptions.

The belief that sitting down and talking will ensure mutual understanding and solve problems is based on the assumption that we can say what we mean, and that what we say will be understood as we mean it. This is unlikely to happen if conversational styles differ.

Communication is a system. Everything that is said is simultaneously an instigation and a reaction, a reaction and an instigation. Most of us tend to focus on the first part of that process while ignoring or downplaying the second. We see ourselves as reacting to what others say and do, without realizing that their actions or words are in part reactions to ours, and that our reactions to them won't be the end of the process but rather will trigger more reactions, in a continuous stream.

If women resent men's tendency to offer solutions to problems, men complain about women's refusal to take action to solve the problems.

Many women feel it is natural to consult with their partners at every turn, while many men automatically make more decisions without consulting their partners. This may reflect a broad difference in conceptions of decision making. Women expect decisions to be discussed first and made by consensus. They appreciate the discussion itself as evidence of involvement and communication.

the ways of doing things or speaking can be judged incorrect by some external standard. But often critics—male and female—want their intimates to adhere to standards that are not absolute but simply reflect their own cultural conventions, or even their individual habits and styles. And what seems "illogical" is often an expression of a different rather than a lapsed logic.

Yet another man commented that women seem to wallow in their problems, wanting to talk about them forever, whereas he and other men want to get them out and be done with them.