Quotes About Communication

We need an inflation-generative grammar.

the result of an estimated 86.5% of 20C dates was a state of severe emotional dissonance between the date's participants, a dissonance attributed by most sources to basic psychosemantic miscodings

The thing that I think a lot of us forget is that part of the fault is the books . . . you get this sort of cycle that as they become less important commercially they begin protecting their egos by talking more and more to each other and establishing themselves as this kind of tight cloistered world that doesn't really have anything to do with regular readers.

The big thing (that really good fiction) can do is leaping over that wall of self and portraying inner experience and setting up a kind of intimate conversation between two consciousnesses . . . the trick is going to be trying to find a way to do it--and for a generation--whose relation to the long sustained, linear verbal communication is fundamentally different.

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

with a big color Xerox of M. Hamilton as Oz's West Witch on the door and custom fiber-wiring for a tri-modem TP console.

right before he'd mailed her child an expensive toy and then had his phone number changed, he'd awakened from a night of horror-show

Ndiawar is bent to an open drawer. 'Your new art therapy person,' he says to Yang. Yang looks Day in the eye. 'Look, man' he says. 'I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally.

live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" 70 have been thrown into big-time flux.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words.

of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications 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.

It occurs to me that neither my aunt nor my uncle has once asked what happened to the pretty little thing that came visiting with us last time we were up, and I wonder what my mother has said to my aunt. I begin to be anxious about something I can neither locate nor define.

No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.

we don't take it seriously enough as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan's lame F.C.C. chairman Mark Fowler professed to see it in 1981, as "just another appliance, a toaster with pictures.

My aunt asks again if I'm sure it's no problem and I don't answer because I'm afraid of how my voice will sound.

And I'll say that I felt something dark in my heart when my husband almost nudged me there. I felt that it was a sorry business indeed when my own spouse couldn't tell I was being serious. And I told him so.

well-trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.'s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to watching eyes, makes genuine human encounters even scarier.

Television," after all, literally means "seeing far";

Simplicity is achieved when everyone can easily understand and use the design, regardless of experience, literacy, or concentration level.

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands—it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language.

It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men.

When you and your brother are friends, his doings are indifferent to you. When you have quarrelled, all his outgoings and incomings you know, as if you were his spy.

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiast, but it's the truth nevertheless — pictures tell any story more effectively than words.

That had always been the power of media in the hands of a good leader. To get individuals to feel as if the leader was speaking directly