Quotes About Communication

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means." "Bullshit. It's cooperation.

Oh, bullshit," Wyatt said. I blinked. "This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.

As Lichtenberg said of angels," he wrote in one of his last letters, "so I say of dust. If they, or it, ever could speak to us, why in God's name should we understand?

Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador's Language.

Of course you didn't volunteer the information, or even damn well admit it. But shit, Uther, I came to you and confronted you with what I'd worked out, and you Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Well, you're too professional to give away anything that could come back to bite you, but if you'd wanted to mislead me or leave me thinking I was wrong you could have.

and then the other op-er-at-or told the formal in-stee-gay-tor that his suit could not be heard the very

Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to.

Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote.

His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a "y" to an "e" in a name for power, "sun-writing" becomes "light-drawing." The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. *There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time.* 'It'll be shortened with use,' Bren told me. 'Soon they'll be saying you're a girl ate what was given her.

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.

What was the point of dedicating your life to giving warnings if everyone who might have listened—because the majority were still unbothered and would possibly remain so till the sun went out—merely nodded and agreed?

Termagant!" he moaned after her. "Shrew! Harridan! All right, all right, you win, you, you . . . uh . . . virago, you spitfire . . ." He rubbed his head and sat up, grinned sheepishly. Lin made an obscene gesture at him without turning around.

No existe nada igual en ningún sitio -dijo -. En ningún sitio. No se trata de los sonidos. No es en los sonidos donde vive el significado.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I'd grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened or what I said had, in which it had gone from being spoken to being unspoken again, a secret everybody knew. Here I was, hesitating to speak it. I took persuading.

The postcode did not look quite regular. Some hush-hush Trystero carrier?

The thing is," Deeba said, eyeing Mr. Speaker, "you could only make words do what you want if it was just you deciding what they mean. But it isn't. It's everyone else, too. Which means you might want to give them orders, but you aren't in control. No one is.

staggering out of Language, into language

Spending time with most automa is like accompanying someone brutally cognitively damaged, but Ehrsul was a friend. "Come save me from the village idiots," she sometimes said to me after downloading updates alongside other automa.

But sharing has its limits. It might make you famous, but chances are it won't earn you a buck. It might find you new people to connect with, but it won't make it any easier to click with them. And it might let you tell the world what's on your mind; but it won't make the world listen.

People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There'll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.