Quotes About Communication

She thinks: They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

and she is so afraid to try her French that she goes to bed hungry.

Mutti, what goes around the world but stays in a corner?" "I don't know, Max." "A postage stamp.

Everybody, he is learning, likes to hear themselves talk. Hubris, like the oldest stories. They raise the antenna too high, broadcast for too many minutes, assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not.

But he didn't have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn't explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him.

A moment like this--the four of them around the table under the sad, dusty kitchen lamp--could never accommodate all the things she had to say.

Don't tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don't lie to me.

He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.

How much easier it would have been if he and Sandy could have fought: a skirmish in the night, some harsh words, some measure of the truth actually spoken aloud.

There are a thousand metaphors and all of them are inaccurate

when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said.

A is ???? is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. ? is ???? is beta: based on the floor plan of a house. ? is ? ???? is omega, the mega O: a great whale's mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

But I wasn't trying to reach England. Or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me.

Werner turns the fine-tune dial fractionally, and abruptly the voice booms into his ears, Dvee-nat-set, shayst-nat-set, davt-set-adeen, nonsense, terrible nonsense, pipelined directly into his head; it's like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open your skin.

Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent.

They would not get closer to the truth that night. They watched a period of hockey in silence. Winkler insisted on doing the dishes. Herman insisted on driving him to the bus stop.

?????, ornis, it means both bird and omen—

If we don't talk to the thing we are afraid of, it becomes the thing we hope to kill.

husband, a certain thought ringing like a bell calling

Then she begins to move her arms in a short, intricate dance, striking the palm of one hand with the edge of the other, circling her fingers through the air, touching her right ear, finally pointing both index fingers at Joseph. He does not know what to make of it. Her fingers repeat the dance: her hands draw a circle; the palms turn up; the fingers lock. Her lips move but no sound comes out. There is a large silver watch on her wrist which rides up and down her forearm as she gesticulates.

He thought of his year with Sandy in the house on Shadow Hill, how her eyes went to the windows, the silent desperation of everything they never said—gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.