Quotes About Communication

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.

The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty.

Dear Adrian – or rather, Dear Adrian and Veronica (hello, Bitch, and welcome to this letter)

He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper. Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound.

Due altre cose ha detto nel corso degli anni: che certe donne non sono affatto misteriose ma vengono rese tali dall'incapacità degli uomini di capirle. da Il senso di una fine

I keep alive our lost private language.

You still don't get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying.

she wonders whether the Holy Ghost, conventionally represented as a dove, would not be better portrayed as a parrot. Logic is certainly on her side: parrots and Holy Ghosts can speak, whereas doves cannot.

At the end of my first year at university, I was at home for three months, visibly and unrepentantly bored. Those of the same age today will find it hard to imagine the laboriousness of communication back then. Most of my friends were far-flung, and—by some unexpressed but clear parental mandate—use of the telephone was discouraged. A letter, and then a letter in reply. It was all slow-paced, and lonely.

One secret of the Christian religion's success was always to employ the best moviemakers

This was another skill women were meant to learn: when a man's story had come to an end. Mostly, it wasn't a problem, as the end was thumpingly obvious; or else the narrator started snorting with laughter in advance, which was always a pretty good clue. Martha had long ago decided only to laugh at things she found funny. It seemed a normal sort of rule; but most men found it rebuking.

The government had been talking about sexually transmitted disease. But it was the same with words: they too could be sexually transmitted.

It was always my mother who policed me. My father was milder, and less given to judgement. He preferred to allow things to blow over, to let sleeping dogs lie, not to stir up mud; whereas my mother preferred facing facts and not brushing things under the carpet. My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a "car crash of cliché" is itself a cliché.

Nowadays we talk about transactional sex, and recreational sex. No one, back then, had recreational sex. Well, they might have done, but they didn't call it that. Back then, back there, there was love, and there was sex, and there was a commingling of the two, sometimes awkward, sometimes seamless, which sometimes worked out, and sometimes didn't.

But he knew that she used to read his diary. So he would deliberately write into it, for a date a few weeks ahead, 'Suicide'. Or, sometimes, 'Marriage

I know already that she and her husband have separate beds, indeed separate rooms, and their marriage has been unconsummated—or rather, sex-free—for almost twenty years; but I haven't pressed her for reasons or particulars.

You marry to continue the conversation.

that there were some women who aren't at all mysterious, but are only made so by men's inability to understand them.

Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered anymore, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else?

Why should a word in a recipe be less important than a word in a novel? One can lead to physical indigestion, the other to mental. I

Arthur, my dear," she interrupts. "There is something I wish to talk about." He looks surprised, and slightly alarmed. If he has always valued her directness, there is a residual suspicion within him that whenever a woman says something must be talked about, it is rarely something to a man's comfort or advantage.

It was possible for couples to not discover that they are in profound disagreement over the very fundamentals of life until ten or twenty years of marriage.

Mary: "Don't be spiky, when I only want what you want – for you and Tony to walk into the sunset together." Mabel: "Then why turn up looking like a cross between a Vogue fashion plate and a case of dynamite?" Mary: "Well, I can't make it too easy for him.

The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.