Quotes About Communication

She enjoyed being told off by them. She could hear the rhythms of her own voice, her mother's voice, her grandmother's voice, every relieved cranky woman from the beginning of time.

The other mothers, the teachers, the people . I didn't realize that having a child was so social. You're always talking to people.

Do you think you were locked in a cupboard as a child?" Cecilia had asked him once (she wouldn't have put it past his mother), but he said he was pretty sure he wasn't.

Afterward, I felt it had been wrong not telling the family about the baby, because then I wanted them to know about the miscarriage, so that they knew the baby had existed. But when I told people, they seemed more interested in the fact that I'd kept the pregnancy a secret. They felt they'd been tricked. They said things like "Oh, I did wonder that day when you didn't drink at the Easter BBQ but you said you just didn't feel like drinking!" In other words, LIAR.

He's the first person I want to tell when somebody upsets me; my foot pressing on the accelerator, desperate to get home from work just to tell him, the moment I tell him, the moment his face lights up with fury on my behalf, it's better, it's fixed.

If the counselor ever wrote a book about her experience as a marriage counselor she would probably mention it: I once had a patient who treated his car more tenderly than he treated his wife. (No need to mention the car was a Lamborghini, otherwise all the male readers would say, "Oh, well, then.")

But women like Tess didn't seem to have that need to share the ordinary facts of their lives, and that made Cecilia desperate to know them.

If her mother had been observing this interaction, she'd tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation. If her father were here, he'd put his finger to his lips and say, "Shh." Clementine settled for two words. "I'm sorry," she said.

That was the secret of a happy marriage. Step away from the rage.

It was one of the best things about him; he liked to talk about people, study them, and work them out. He was interested in the complexities of relationships.

Jane walked into the playground feeling a strange sense of calm. Perhaps she needed to learn from Madeline's example. No more avoiding confrontation. March up to your critics and bloody well tell them what you think.

Her fiancé, Nico, now handled all the small-talk requirements of their relationship, chatting to chatty cab drivers and chatty aunts with ease. Christina sometimes fretted she wasn't bringing enough to the table. 'A relationship isn't a bill you split down the middle,' Nico told her. He was wrong. It was exactly like that. She'd keep an eye on it.

Why hadn't that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn't feel like a nag.

It was just a plate, her father kept saying to Christina. He never understood what that plate represented: Disrespect. Disregard. Contempt.

Recently, she'd noticed something strange happening when she talked to people in groups. She couldn't quite remember how to be. She'd find herself thinking: Did I just laugh too loudly? Did I forget to laugh? Did I just repeat myself?

It was why marriages fell apart. It was why, if you valued your marriage, you kept a barricade around yourself and your feelings and your thoughts. You didn't let your eyes linger. You didn't stay for the second drink. You kept the flirting safe. You just didn't go there.

They tended to give a little start when she spoke, as if the potted plant had tried to join in the conversation.

Little things I do start to annoy him. He gets a bit irritable. I try to placate him. I start walking on eggshells, but at the same time I'm angry that I have to walk on eggshells, so sometimes I stop tiptoeing. I stomp on the eggshells. I deliberately aggravate him because I'm so angry with him, and with myself, for having to be careful. And then it happens again.

It sometimes seemed so peculiar and so wrong that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with him and wake up with him, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don't even know his telephone number, or where he's living or working, or what he did today or last week or last year.

They'd been too tired to keep sharpening the edges of their hurt feelings.

She knew one tiny grandchild was all it would take to stop the silence roaring, to make her days splutter back to life again, but you could not ask your children for grandchildren.

admit it to her dad, who would just take what she said at face value, rather than her mother, who would listen too intently and empathetically and filter everything through her own emotions.

They'd both apologized, and there had been no lingering bitterness. Will wasn't a sulker. He was actually pretty good at negotiating a compromise. And he rarely lost his sense of humor or ability to laugh at himself. "Did you see the way I repacked your frying pan?" he said. "That was a masterstroke, eh? Put you in your place, didn't it?" For a moment

Janie eating. Janie sulking. Janie with her friends. Including him. That boy. His head turned away from the camera, looking at Janie, as if she'd just said something smart and funny. What did she say? Every time, she always wondered that. What did you just say, Janie? Rachel pressed her fingertip to his grinning, freckled face, and watched her mildly arthritic, age-spotted hand curl into a fist.