Quotes About Communication

How did you know about the fire?" I asked Morelli. "Dispatch called me. They always call me when your car explodes or goes up in flames.

My mother started as soon as I hit the front porch. Every time I see you, you look worse and worse.

I was listening to you the whole time. I didn't trust you to hang on to the earbud, so I had a mini-microphone sewn into your shirt. It's just under the rolled hem on the neckline." I glanced at it. "I thought it was just another rhinestone.

here," Briggs said.

You're his what?" "Amanuensis.

There was a lot of swearing and ineffective bitch-slapping

don't carry one of your trackers?" "I'll call you on your cellphone.

What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?

We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.

but for poetry one needs one's native tongue. The voice of the soul is not so easily translated.

Talk to me. Look up, I thought. But she didn't, only stopped and picked a sprig of alyssum to smell the honey. I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.

My words, that's what she wanted. What's this? she kept asking. What's this? But how could I tell her? She'd taken all the words.

You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.

She yearned to call him, but hated the sound of the phone ringing, ringing, knowing that he might be standing right there, not picking up, knowing it was her.

Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

Do go on," I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.

But she understood, even lies could be true, if you knew how to listen.

She couldn't help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn't as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be.

Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind

The lay reader, who knows only what the biographer tells him, reads it, as he reads every other biography, in a state of bovine equanimity.)

We lied to our parents and we lied to each other and we lied to ourselves, so addicted to deception had we become.

A correspondence is a kind of love affair.

In most interviews, both subject and interviewer give more than is necessary. They are always being seduced and distracted by the encounter's outward resemblance to an ordinary friendly meeting.