Quotes About Communication

I could talk fast -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.

Gossip - invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate the truth.

one kept me informed on Dad's progress. Or lack of progress. Or how serious it all was—is. You certainly didn't, darling." Yet, was this true? Vaguely I seemed to know that my father was not doing well for some time. Driving on our country roads you see the carcasses of animals—raccoons, deer—lying at the roadside, killed

The wife felt the rebuke. For some rebukes are husbandly.

left the house in time to catch the bus. Lorraine called goodbye after her as always but Tippi scarcely glanced back, and her voice was flat, almost inaudible—"Bye, Mom.

No hagas caso a tu abuela, cariño. Ella es de los tiempos del cine mudo y nosotras, del sonoro.

misinterpreting her silence for a broken heart, her cynicism about men for depression, or despondency [...]

Because nothing between human beings isn't uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

In love there are two things—bodies and words.

Moving your asshole-mouth & YES SIR I am saying NO MA'AM I am saying.

Mom's new husband was eleven years older than Mom. He had been Mom's boss at the Buick dealership where she'd worked until they were married, and you could see that he was still Mom's boss—the way he spoke to her, not exactly giving orders, never forgetting to say Please but in a tone of voice that meant there was no negotiating. Of

a mother's crying, stifled, soundless, secret so as not to disturb. If you cried so others could hear you were crying to be heard but a mother's crying was just the opposite, crying not to be heard.

When a man shares with a woman his marital/domestic problems, the kind of problems that seem never to be solved but only to morph into yet more complicated problems, like hair snarls proliferating, sympathy flows in one direction only. By instinct a woman knows it's naive to expect the flow to reverse.

Thank you, Patrick—" but she spoke too softly

En una familia, lo que no se dice es lo que se espera oír. Pero el ruido que hace una familia es para que no se oiga.

It was a principle of hers that you must never say anything about another person you would not say in that person's presence.

You can be on easy terms with such a man, you can see that he likes you, then by mistake you say the wrong word or make the wrong assumption and something shuts down in his face. Like an iron grating over a pawnshop window on a rundown street in Atlantic City. That abrupt.

Though words sometimes puzzled Alma, she never looked up any word in any dictionary; a word was like a pebble to be turned briefly in the hand, and tossed away, with no expectation that it would be encountered again.

Why had she hesitated to say they were lost, why hadn't she told him to turn the car around, to reverse their course, oh please!—but she had not dared offend him. The black water was her fault, she knew. You just don't want to offend them. Even the nice ones.

Es curioso, siempre sabes más de lo que dices. Quiero decir, cualquier persona. Lo que dices siempre es menos de lo que sabes.

Some of the girls with steady boyfriends even hinted at or informed their boyfriends they were having their periods. Marianne couldn't imagine such openness, such intimacy. She'd never been that close to any boy, had had countless friends who were boys, yet few boyfriends with all that implied of specialness, possessiveness. Sharing secrets. No, not even her brothers, not even Patrick she adored.

Mom was stubborn, and eloquent.

Marianne was not the type to speak of such things, she'd worry she was betraying the boy's confidence, but if the boy was pursuing her, so much more doggedly than other boys had pursued her. Marianne would be terribly distressed. Nothing worried her more than the possibility she'd hurt someone's feelings.

Because Judson Andrew Mulvaney was the last born of the Mulvaney children. Because I was Babyface, Dimple, Ranger, I was the last to know everything: good news or bad, and probably there were lots of things I never knew at all.