Quotes About Communication

and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any other manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason.

It's so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it's easier.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across this room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich and complicated and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not a good writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.

Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I'll show you a bullshit artist.

Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.

Don't cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen - one way to lower the flag to half mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?

Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth

I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused.

There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.

the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain.

I think, today's irony ends up saying: How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader. And my personal belief is a lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life - that's our opening, and that's' our gift.

sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.

Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces.

This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self.

This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, for listening to.

Poetry, you were talking about," Julie smiles, touching Faye's cheek. Faye lights a cigarette in the wind. "I've just never liked it. It beats around bushes. Even when I like it it's nothing more than a really oblique way of saying the obvious, it seems like." Julie grins. Her front teeth have a gap. "Olé," she says. "But consider how very, very few of us have the equipment to deal with the obvious.

I can remember hearing one middle-aged man who sat nearby saying 'Simmer down, boyo' to another older man seated kitty-corner to me across the doorway to one of the hallways extending out from the waiting area, except when I looked up from the book both these men were staring straight ahead, expressionless, with no sign of anyone needing to 'simmer down' in any conceivable way.

Word inflation . . . Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.