Quotes About Communication

It is hard to listen while you were talking.

She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it.

Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else's. It's a form of control, as so much of generosity is.

What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.

He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.

ellipsis, he'd been told, could literally be translated as 'to hide behind silence'. It's fascinating stuff, he said.

She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next

mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.

And saying you love him is the same as saying you don't want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,' she said, 'you would find out.

I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

He was all for people speaking their minds but it did make him miss the time when what was beneath the surface had been permitted to stay there.

Mothers are such liars,' he said. 'Language is all they have. They fill you up with language if you let them.

you had said those things to him, you understand, you would have heard some truths in return. If you had been frank you would have elicited frankness.

More than anything,' he said, 'people dislike being made to feel stupid, and if you arouse those feelings, you do so at your own cost.

As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition – I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

Joskus minun vain täytyy saada puhua jotta tuntisin itseni todelliseksi, ja toivoisin että sinäkin puhuisit minulle." Hän makasi vaiti pimeässä ja tuijotti kattoon. Sitten hän sanoi: "Minusta tuntuu kuin sydämeni puhuisi sinulle koko ajan.

maybe it's just you become disinhibited. He'd felt this last night, socializing with people in their twenties. He'd forgotten how phsysically shy they were.

Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.

He doesn't comment and he doesn't criticise and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself, because as I've told you I've been criticised all my life: it's how I've come to know that I'm there.

I feel like my heart is talking to you all the time.

It was hard to listen while you were talking. I had found out more by listening than I had ever thought possible.

Como en el amor, continué, que te entiendan crea el temor a que no vuelvan a entenderte jamás.