Quotes About Communication

Well, they don't talk to me very much, I said. You see, they're all grown up, and they have grown-up games like whist and lawn tennis, and talking, you know, just for the sake of talking (this seemed a strange pursuit to me).

I'm sorry," James says. "I don't speak Mandarin." Here's a liability of his: he always wants to help, but his ignorance makes him useless to his own kind. Not just to this man, but to every lost Mandarin-speaking traveler fumbling in mid-transfer who mistakes him for a helpful guide.

For God's sake, no." Brenda's voice is sharp. "I told you, he never told me about any fifty thousand. What are you implying here? You want to make me out as some kind of slut? A whore? You want the jury to think that Dagou tried to pay me to move in with him?

And so the result of several years of Everybody Shareskyism, other than slaughtering people, is for everybody to stand around and stare blankly at each other.

GARRY TRUDEAU IN his Doonesbury comic strip had been twitting the president about his shattered syntax and making it appear as if the president couldn't organize a sentence on his own. While that was frequently true when speaking extempore, he could do so with preparation.

is responsive, not proactive. Give him candid feedback. He doesn't show the passion for the role we need.

Sometimes there's no way around it—you have to let people go. But again you do it as constructively as you can.

At a meeting in a formal, hierarchical setting, a powerful player can get away with killing a good idea. But informality encourages people to test their thinking, to experiment, and to cross-check.

I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening. I never learned anything while I was talking.

And every faggot couple I know is deep into friendship and deep into fucking with everyone else but each other and any minute any bump appears in their commitment to infinitesimally obstruct their view, out they zip like petulant kids to suck someone else's lollipop instead of trying to work things out, instead of trying not to hide, and…unh…why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?!

A penis has never been something that you pick up and put down and put away idly without consideration.

I don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it.

The smartest man alive can't learn much about a woman in two weeks.

I don't know why you would even want to stay with me, I said. T.R. looked stunned for a second and then whipped her elbow into my side as hard as she could--months later it was determined that the jab cracked a rib. Oh, get fucked! she said, jumping up. No wonder you don't have no girlfriend if you don't have no more feelings than to say a horrible thing like that. All I want to do is love you. Ain't you even gonna let me?

Wrong theory," Augustus said. "Talk's the way to kill it. Anything gets boring if you talk about it enough, even death.

Razzy was insulting me silently somehow.

figure the reason you don't have much to say is you probably never met a man who liked to hear a woman talk.

She had always loved to tease and considered it an irony of her life that she was often drawn to men who didn't recognize teasing even when she was inflicting it on them.

You better introduce yourself before you start talking Latin.

But then July accepted it and never scolded back, so perhaps that was the way of the world: women scolded, and men kept quiet and stayed out of the way as much as possible.

You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we're a perfect match, as long as we don't hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.

Now speech had left her; fear took its place.

It's just that it's fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.

It was often that way with women, it seemed. One minute Lorie would be drilling holes in him with her eyes, and the next minute she and Clarie would be combing one another's hair and singing tunes.