Quotes About Listening

In a sense, I'm always hearing music of some sort, whether it's people talking or surface noise or whatever, because there is no privacy. So when I'm by myself, I just kind of like to be and reflect, and I can't do that when I'm listening to music. Because it's someone else's reflections, not mine.

People like to know you're listening, and something as simple as a clarification question shows not only that you are listening but that you also care about what they're saying. You'll be surprised how much respect and appreciation you gain just by asking good questions.

I hope people listen to black people more. You'd be surprised how little people listen to black people when it comes to racial issues. It's weird.

I'd like liberals to listen to my show and not feel offended. The fact that the love of my life was a liberal, I think that probably surprises people who expect me to spew just contempt for the other side.

Most people do surprisingly poorly when dealing with a relative who is hurting, depressed, or anxious - we get defensive and try to solve the problem rather than finding the truth in what the person is saying.

This is the first lesson for writers - or anyone - who conducts interviews: If you want someone to talk, you've got to know how to listen. And good listening is a surprisingly active process. The interviewee is your focus of attention; you are there to hear what he says and thinks, exclusively.

I've always wanted to be on an original cast recording. I grew up listening to them, and now to know that my voice is heard on three or four of them is just surreal. I never thought I would be that person.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch.

You sound like a nice man," the woman said. "Do I? Well, that's nice of you to say." He knew he should hang up now, but it was good to hear a voice, even his own, in the quiet room.

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark." Uddrag fra: Raymond Carver. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". Apple Books.

Oía los latidos de mi corazón. Oía el corazón de los demás.

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway.

Permanecí sentado, muy quieto, escuchando cómo iba aquietándose la tarde por las ventanas abiertas. Y, muy lentamente, fui aquietándome con ella.

No estoy dispuesto a hablar, Eddie. ¿Por qué iba a hacerlo? Dejó la pistola sobre el escritorio y la golpeó con la mano abierta. - Esto -dijo-. Y yo podría hacer que le resultara provechoso. - Ya, eso suena mejor. No meta la pistola en este asunto. Yo siempre estoy dispuesto a escuchar el sonido del dinero.

I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.

Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.

So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening, and even then—as we've seen in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, testifying against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—continuing to be silenced. Just as Gerard Baker did, for changing the story about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Blasey Ford received death threats. One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them.

When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.

As the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman puts it in her book Trauma and Recovery: "His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. . . . Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients." If they were telling the truth, he would have to challenge the whole edifice of patriarchal authority to support them.

The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It's how we make the world.

Much of this is done through speech, through telling of one's plight, through being heard, through hearing compassion and understanding in the response of the people you tend to, whom you befriend. Not only women do this, but perhaps women do this more routinely. It's how I cope, or how my community helps me cope, now that I have one.

Es la arrogancia lo que lo hace difícil, en ocasiones, para cualquier mujer en cualquier campo; es la que mantiene a las mujeres alejadas de expresar lo que piensan y de ser escuchadas cuando se atreven a hacerlo; la que sumerge en el silencio a las mujeres jóvenes indicándoles, de la misma manera que lo hace el acoso callejero, que este no es su mundo.