Quotes About Communication

Human language is a clumsy tool. People have such a hard time understanding each other, so how can you even begin to imagine the subjectivities of animals and insects and plants, never mind pebbles and sand? Bound as you are by your senses -- so blunt and yet so beautiful -- it's impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too. Books are in an odd position, caught halfway in between. We are sensible, if not sentient. We are semi-living.

Sometimes you don't need words to say what's in your heart.

Assumptions suck. They're like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship

So of course I feel angry, I said, angrily. What do you expect? It was a stupid thing to ask. Yes, she agreed. It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you're angry. I don't need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that. So why did you ask? Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me. I asked for you, she said. For me? So you could hear the answer.

The first words of a book are of utmost importance. The moment of encounter, when a reader turns to that first page and reads those opening words, it's like locking eyes or touching someone's hand for the first time, and we feel it, too.

Pencils have stories inside them, and they're safe as long as you don't stick the point in your ear.

the newly empowered advertising industry used its forked tongue to convert citizens into consumers. But

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.30 And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting,31 it kind of broke my heart.

Obviously there are things a kid doesn't need to know about his parents, but you could tell some of them.

I wonder if any of us ever really knows another person?" she replied, sounding wistful.

What I was learning, on those weekend walks, is how much you can find out about a person merely by watching what he eats. Food became my own private way of looking at the world.

Now I have to telephone.

mauve-grey envelope

She believed that friendships, to begin well, had to stand on mutual information and lots of it.

He danced the way he made love, with passion and tenderness and spirit, communicating with hands and eyes the most subtle messages, tenderly making up for Lila's awkwardness. In his lashes and his hair, mist clung in tiny diamond drops. She could not take her eyes from him.

I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

Even when you're talking to them face to face you have this feeling of not connecting, as if the words just pass through them. Sometimes they remind me of the Invisible Man, but I've never quite understood why they end up that way.

Even now I occasionally get a long letter from Kimiko, who's still in and out of mental hospitals. I've never written a reply. The Last Picture Show Iwas eighteen.

Só é possível confiar em alguém quando se acredita no diálogo com essa pessoa. (Miso soup, trad. Jefferson José Teixeira, ed. Cia. das Letras, 2005, p. 153)

The instant you put something like that into words, it was gone. Words and combinations of words - the more you relied on them, the less power you actually had.

She wanted to find out about the gods of this country, but she couldn't find any books on the subject in Spanish, and she doesn't read English, so she asked a lot of her customers, but apparently none of the Japanese knew anything, which made her wonder if people here never came up against the kind of suffering where you can't do anything but turn to your god for help. . .

What these young men feared and hated more than anything else was being spoken to by people they hadn't met, or having to explain themselves to people they didn't know.

I hate people who break down crying when you're trying to talk about something important. Men and women both. You can't trust weepy people. They think they're the center of the world, and that their tears can absolve them of anything.

He's got five rings in his ear, eighteen gauge to ten gauge, but when I told him to get one in his nipple to match mine, and to get a Sailor Moon tattoo - because I like Sailor Moon? - or if not that, a skull, he stopped calling me.