Quotes About Communication

Avec l'amour, l'amitié et la fraternité d'action, l'art est le plus court chemin d'un homme à un autre.

Look, all I meant is...words are words. They don't matter as much as you think the do. What's important are the emotions behind them" -Josh

But that's the thing about words. They can't ever really erase other words. They can scribble over them, but they can never make them totally go away." -Autumn

Nunca hay que escribir con la concha

Un pacto tácito de frases hechas encadenadas, palabras que iban llenando el silencio, con el propósito de ni siquiera tener que hablar del silencio.

uno debería escribir en la lengua con la que piensa, con la que sueña.

De allí somos, de donde florece o da fruto cada palabra.

lloro porque el lenguaje —como el camino que uno no elige de antemano— es una zona de riesgo que te puede hacer pasar por donde más duele.

Cuando descubrí lo que era coger le pregunté a mi madre, con la sorpresa, la inocencia y el espanto de la infancia, si eso que me habían dicho mis amigas era cierto, si de verdad las mujeres debían dejar que los hombres «metieran su pito» dentro de una. Mi madre me miró, se tomó un instante y luego dijo: «No lo pienses así, es como cuando uno tiene hambre y come, o tiene sed y toma agua». No mencionó el amor. Ni siquiera los hijos por venir.

Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.

I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect do not exist.

Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. (Ralph Ellison)

You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with "yes, and" rather than "yes, but.

Words work as release--well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture.

After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven't you said this yourself? Haven't you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don't forget.

You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.

As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling." —

You don't speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.

Words work as release—well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid—what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise—words encoding the bodies they cover. And despite everything the body remains.

channeling his assertion that the less that is communicated the better. Be ambiguous. This type of ambiguity could also be diagnosed as dissociation and would support Serena's claim that she has had to split herself off from herself and create different personae. Now

Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this. For

To converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and the unsaid.

All living is listening for a throat to open-- The length of its silence shaping lives. When he opened his mouth to speak, his speech was what was written in the silence, the length of the silence becoming a living.

Le mot 'chat' signifie 'la chose blanche qui ronronne' (lors du cours sur la Métaphysique des Espèces Naturelles, Collège de France 2013-2014)