Quotes About Communication

Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit.

Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.

When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.

Pero los hombres que explican cosas aún asumen que soy, en una obscena metáfora fecundadora, un recipiente vacío que debe ser rellenado con su sabiduría y conocimiento.

Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anectodes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.

Writing is lonely, it's an intimate talk with the undead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers , with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later.

As a scientist, I don't believe that our messages are ignored by the public because people don't care. Many people don't have a science background or find it challenging to stay engaged in a technical debate that can be really alienating

If you lack words for a phenomenon, an emotion, a situation, you can't talk about it, which means that you can't come together to address it, let alone change it.

Books are solitudes in which we meet

And yet the experience happens anyway. Again and again I have seen people slip into this realm and light up with joy. The lack of language doesn't prevent them from experiencing it, only from grasping and making something of it.

Saying this upset some men. Many among that curious gender are easy to upset, and when they are upset they don't know it. They just think you're wrong and sometimes also evil.

Had I visited at an earlier hour she would have found fault with something I'd done when I was with her. And had I not given her a copy, another failure could be charted. There was no winning, just some decisions about how to lose and how not to play.

Es la arrogancia lo que lo hace difícil, en ocasiones, para cualquier mujer en cualquier campo; es la que mantiene a las mujeres alejadas de expresar lo que piensan y de ser escuchadas cuando se atreven a hacerlo; la que sumerge en el silencio a las mujeres jóvenes indicándoles, de la misma manera que lo hace el acoso callejero, que este no es su mundo.

We'd never set eyes on each other before. But that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.

To tell a story and have it and the teller recognized and respected is still one of the best methods we have of overcoming trauma.

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.

This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.

The great skill in lying is not lying, you'd say. Just leaving things out. Keeping everything as close to the actual truth as possible. Nothing overblown.

Mama parted with these Divine Secrets because I asked her to, Sidda thought. the reason I feel like crying, Sidda realized, is not just because this scrapbook is vulnerable, but because Mama, whether she knows it or not, has made herself so vulnerable to me.

this architect who everyone misunderstands. I completely forget to ask what she and Charlene are going to laugh about. One evening Mama takes Baylor and Little Shep and Lulu and me to Fred's Hamburger Drive-In where we eat at least

Siddalee looked at me like: You liar, Daddy, you big liar. I don't know why I'm thinking

and I will always have to be careful with each other. She