Quotes About Communication

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

I love you. You've loved other people but you still left them. It's not that simple. I don't want to be another scalp on your pole.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

I don't know how to answer. I know what to think, but words in the head are like voices under water. They are distorted.

There are voices and they must be heard.

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence.

I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I.

It's the clichés that cause the trouble.

Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.

I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively.

It is always a mistake to argue with a librarian.

Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.

The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language.

Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.

What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about.