Quotes About Communication

He wanted an answer, a simple, uncomplicated set of words wrapped around an idea he could accept. His companion's answer, however, told him there was nothing simple or uncomplicated about his question, no matter how straight-forward it might have seemed to him.

Straightforwardness without civility is like a surgeon's knife, effective but unpleasant. Candor with courtesy is helpful and admirable." Master

Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary

Unkind words are ruthless murderers of lifelong friendships and the harmony of homes. Banish unkind words from your lips forever, and make your home life safe from trouble. Sincere, sweet words are nectar to thirsty souls. They are in demand everywhere. Sweet words create happiness in friends, enemies, churches, business offices, and everywhere. People feel happy when a crabby person leaves the room, and they are glad when a sweet-voiced, sincere friend appears.

Straightforwardness without civility is like a surgeon's knife, effective but unpleasant. Candor with courtesy is helpful and admirable.

Straightforwardness without civility is like a surgeon's knife, effective but unpleasant.

If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.

The journalistic cliché that this is the -information age- is misleading if it suggests that in the past, either recent or distant, we did not depend on information.

Social exchange is certainly among the oldest of human behaviors, as humans have depended on sharing and exchanging resources for a very long time.

Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there's anything in the father worth seeing. Until he's dead, and it's too late. Mercifully, doctors are also opaque to their patients.

Ik wachtte tot Hekabe zou spreken, maar ze zei niets. Misschien dat ze, oog in oog met dit uitzicht, woorden zo'n gedevalueerd ruilmiddel vond dat ze het als verloren moeite beschouwde ze nog te gebruiken.

He paused. Then added with great emphasis: You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.

If he'd learned nothing else at the Slade he'd learned that men and women could be friends, even intimate friends, without sex intruding.

privacy sacrificed without intimacy being gained.

SM is an art. Doing it well requires more than a bag full of expensive whips and exotic electrical toys, a closet full of fetish clothes, or a basement filled with bondage furniture.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.