Quotes About Communication

And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don't, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.

Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.

An English silence—one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties—prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.

Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination—the prompter's voice at his ear—which had added the words "for ever." He hadn't asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.

When he's cheerful his tongue runs away with him, and he's depressed he can be unkind. So it's common sense not to let him into every are of your life.

There's always talk. It's the same price as rain.

Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.

He had entered some state of grace—but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing.

But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.

We didn't do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath.

Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.

I'd read somewhere that if you want to make people pay attention to what you're saying, you don't raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention.

One of my sons writes books I can read, but cannot understand, and the other writes books I can understand, but cannot read.

If I failed to display negatives, then positives would be assumed: this was how it worked.

Vienas anglas yra pasak?s, kad santuoka yra ilgai trunkantis valgymas, kai pudingas paduodamas iš pradži?.

Flaubert le salían las palabras con facilidad; pero también supo ver la insuficiencia subyacente de la Palabra. Recuérdese su triste definición en Madame Bovary: «La palabra humana es como una caldera rota en la que tocamos melodías para que bailen los osos, cuando quisiéramos conmover a las estrellas.»

But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another.

Her diction was formal, her sentence structure entirely grammatical—indeed, you could almost hear the commas, semicolons and full stops.

Early on, she had told him, tenderly, that she had been attracted to him because he was pure and open. But if this didn't make her love him as much as he loved her, then he wished it were otherwise. Not that he felt pure and open. They sounded like words designed to keep him in a box

I didn't want to press Veronica. I thought I'd wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn't expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, for a polite message that it had been nice to see me properly after all these years. Well, perhaps it hadn't been. Perhaps she'd gone on a trip. Perhaps her server was down. Who said that thing about the eternal hopefulness of the human heart?

The parrot/writer feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert

Love means never having to say you're sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). Then there were all those love lines from all those love songs, with the swooning delusions of lyricist, singer, band.

An English silence—one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties—prevailed.

No intento tejer una historia; estoy tratando de contar la verdad.