Quotes About Communication

You need two things in a marriage," she told me. "You need the will to make it work and you need to be able to make compromises. It's not hard to be right, but then you are right and alone.

Did we really have to go through an affair just to be able to be truly honest with each other?" I hear this often and share their regret. But here's one of the unspoken truths about relationships: for many couples, nothing less extreme is powerful enough to get the partners' attention and to shake up a stale system.

In my decades of working with couples, I've observed that those who are most successful in keeping the erotic spark alive are those who are comfortable with the mystery in their midst.

Only when the betrayed partner feels emotionally met will he or she be able to listen to explanations without hearing them as justifications.

In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do.

While emotional transparency is touted everywhere as the crux of modern intimacy, I am amazed at the paucity of real sexual communication between partners. Part of my work in post-infidelity involves direct coaching as to how, why, where, and when to talk about sex.

Sexual honesty isn't just about divulging the details of your infidelities. It's about communicating with your partner in an open and mature way—revealing core aspects of yourself through your sexuality.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break. —Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

The adherents of talk intimacy (often, though not always, women) have a hard time recognizing these other languages for closeness

The wisdom acquired with the passage of time is a useless gift unless you share it.

As soon as we conform anything to language, we've changed it. Use a word and you've altered the world. The poets know this. It's what they try so hard to avoid.

Music is constructed in notes. Language in words. Both are communicating. Music is a language of feeling, the heart. Words are the music of the mind. Theater is their marriage.

In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say 'Hey, listen to me, and i'll listen to you', we're starting a dialogue. And when you do that, this healing happens, and we come out of our corners, and we start to witness each other's common humanity. We start to assert it. And when we do that, really good things happen

I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but I love you," I repeated. I wanted her to accept my apology and then we could kiss and get married. "You love me now?" she asked, straight-faced, turning so she was flat toward me, her hands tucked into the armpits of her sweatshirt. "I love you now." I tried to be clear, unafraid, unconflicted. "Tomorrow?" "I want to marry you," I said. There was a giant pause. We looked at each other.

Like Oscar Hammerstein, LaChiusa knows that characters express themselves in their own wording as well as their own music.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.

And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing--ambiguity is a fact of life.

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

She would like to tell him some strange beautiful thing, if she could speak at all, something to make him speak. Communication would be telling something that is all new, so as to have more of the new told back.

I've said what I had to say.

And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.

For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.

The art that speaks [truth] most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.