Quotes About Communication

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature

I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.

And if you have found your voice, you can be heard

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

I want to touch you.' 'And if you did touch me, what then?' 'I would find a language of beginning.

In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge.

I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.

Creo en la ficción y en el poder de las historias porque así hablamos a través de lenguas que no son nuestras. No se nos silencia. Todos nosotros, cuando sufrimos un gran trauma, dudamos, tartamudeamos; hay grandes pausas en nuestro discurso. La cosa se atasca. Recuperamos el lenguaje a través del lenguaje de otros. Podemos recurrir al poema. Podemos abrir el libro. Alguien ha estado allí por nosotros y buceó en las palabras.

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

U]nhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.

Vertel me een verhaal, Silver. Wat voor verhaal? Het verhaal van wat daarna gebeurde. Dat hangt ervan af. Waarvan? Van hoe ik het vertel.

I love you. The three most difficult words in the world. But what else can I say?

I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them.

I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices under water.

Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. 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 always the wrong size to fit the template called language.

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces--sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.

Neither parent spoke. Milo stood between them like a lighthouse between the rocks and the shipwreck.

The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.

I began to feel like Sarpi, that Venetian priest and diplomat, who said he never told a lie but didn't tell the truth to everyone.