Quotes About Communication

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

Stories are the currency of human relationships.

I've always felt there is something sacred in a piece of paper that travels the earth from hand to hand, head to head, heart to heart.

Whenever I feel that people aren't smiling at me, I simply begin smiling and saying hello.

I asked him why he turned us down, and what I could have done better.

We spoke the words bankers wanted to hear. Our numbers were clear, and we included our track record with our five other properties.

The foundation of a good home is a good marriage. It's simply not possible to have a good home without a good marriage.

People frequently point to communication as a problem, because its easy to notice, but usually it is a symptom of an underlying problem with a relationship posture.

It takes two to have a fight.

What is making contact? It is hard to define, but people do know when they have or have not made contact… Sometimes it seems that humans have lost the art. The range of possibilities for contact open to human beings is extremely large, ranging from conversations that can last hours to something as brief as a pull on a pigtail. However, just a small attempt to make contact with the other person on a regular basis can put a distant relationship back on track.

So if there is one most important gift we can give to the next generation it is that of a solid and satisfying marriage relationship.

If two partners in a relationship work on their own levels of differentiation, their relationship will automatically improve. If even one of the partners works to raise his or her level of differentiation, the relationship will do better over the long term.

The basic pattern in conflictual marriages is one in which neither gives in to the other or in which neither is capable of an adaptive role.... The relationship cycles through periods of intense closeness, conflict that provides a period of emotional distance, and making up, which starts another cycle of intense closeness.

The human dyad is so unstable that when two people who are important to each other develop a problem, which they invariably do, they automatically look around for a third person to include in the anxious situation in some way. The third person is brought into participation in the anxiety of the original twosome, and thus anxiety flows around the triangle.

Usually what people do in a relationship crisis is more of the same thing they have been doing, only more intensely and more anxiously.

The central dilemma in managing the individuality/togetherness force for each person is how to keep the focus on one's own life and life direction but still stay in open, clear communication with the other significant people in that life.

To begin the work of changing a relationship of overfunctioning/ underfunctioning reciprocity, one must not ask, "How can I change this troublesome partner of mine?" Instead the question is, "What is my contribution to this relationship pattern?

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.

For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.

Contact with the skin of a dead animal made it possible to communicate with all other animal species. It was the lingua franca of metamorphosis.

Computers will have to learn that when I quote from some old author who spelled differently from the machine, the wishes of the long-dead author will have to be respected, and the machine will have to mind its manners

If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language.... This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors...who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

There is really no such thing as a secret; everybody likes to tell, and everybody does tell.