Quotes About Communication

It surprised Anna and it upset Anna how small her life was each time she tried to tell it, to shape it in order to escape it, how it always came out too quickly as a few dispiriting sentences so easily dismissed.

Please don't ask how I know such things, please: where fish are concerned I know everything - or as good as - & besides, it's rude to interrupt when I am in the middle of telling you how that sorry crumpled dory began to flare up

His mode of speaking was largely incomprehensible, his tone was portentous, which is perhaps why he inevitably spoke in capital letters. Words existed in his speech as currants in a badly made bread-and-butter pudding - clusters of stodgy darkness

Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.

It was as if words were now a wall between people rather than a bridge, and if you could just build the wall high enough no one would see the growing desert of the vanished on the other side. It was as though everyone was using words to avoid using words for what words were used for.

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.

There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?

And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can't fix anyway. Telling

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.

Conversations with adults other than a person's parents had more of an outcome.

sharing the future with someone would certainly mean that repetitions had to be managed more skillfully.

Men are a strange breed.

This is the only badge of true friendship I'm sure of: not to be curious.

don't see what this has to do with us." I say back, "Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another's life for your own benefit?

I'm not even certain I care to know. Some people were not made to have best friends, and I might be one. Walter might be another, though for different reasons. Acquaintanceship usually suffices for me, which was more or less the one important lesson learned from my Lebanese girlfriend, Selma Jassim, at Berkshire College, since if anything, she believed mutual confidences of almost any kind were just a lot of baloney.

What they talked about and what was in the air was only the present, interrupted by the long times between Monday and Friday. These absences made their closeness to each other even more paramount, since together was where they'd always, only been.

Explaining is where we all get into trouble.

Sometimes, when people in the South tell you to have a blessed day, it means fuck you and I hope you have a nice time in hell.

You know, the thing is with people who never talk, the thing is you always suppose they're harbouring some enormous secret. But, just possibly, the secret is, they have absolutely nothing to say.

The ideal organizational environment encourages everyone to observe, collect data, and speak up.

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.

the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.

The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterward.