Quotes About Communication

In our family, being right trumped being truthful. There was no room for uncertainty, so you never let down your guard.

I'm telling you this because you didn't ask. I've got it all here, growing like a tumor in my throat. I'm telling you because if I don't, I will choke on it. Everybody knows what happened, but nobody asks. And Elvis the EMT doesn't count because when he asked, he didn't even listen to me answer because he was listening to my sister's heart not beat with his stethoscope. I want to tell. It's mine to tell. Even if you didn't ask, you have to hear it.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

A language is a map of our failures

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities

When I try to speak my throat is cut and, it seems, by his hand The sounds I make are prehuman, radical the telephone is always ripped-out and he sleeps on Yet always the tissue grows over, white as silk hardly a blemish maybe a hieroglyph for scream Child, no wonder you never wholly trusted your keepers

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate.

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

We stayed mute and disloyal because we were afraid I would have touched my fingers to where your breasts had been but we never did such things

Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.

This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you.

Tongue on your words to taste you there Couldn't   read what you had never written there Played your message over feeling bad Played your message over it was all I had To tell me what and wherefore this is what it said: I'm tired of you asking me why I'm tired of words like the chatter of birds Give me a pass, let me just get by

I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.

I would feel [my son's] wants at such a moment fraudulent, as an attempt moreover to defraud me of living even for fifteen minutes as myself. My anger would rise

because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

If it is something that you are interested in, and it is your passion, then tell your friends, because help is the best thing. If you stay confident, it will happen.