Quotes About Communication

Are you listening, little bird?

He wiped away the tears, tenderly, and I forgot to weep as he told me silently everything I always wanted to hear.

But it's a whole lot easier to keep[secrets] when you've got someone else who knows breathing in the same room. Carrying them alone is like having a huge spiky weight digging into your shoulders and chest, a weight you can't shift even while you're sleeping.

I sensed him leaning forward. It's weird to feel someone's attention on you that way, like you're the only thing in the world they're listening to. Most of the time people are distracted, or just thinking about what they're going to say next.

I had to settle for two of the most inadequate words in the English language, words to pale to express what I needed to say. "Thank you.

Did she not get it? He'd done everything but hit her on the head and drag her into a cave.

Lonely people talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

I believe in friendship,' Band said to Reinhardt, then made his way to Huston and delivered the present. Huston unwrapped his present. 'This is just swell, amigo – just wonderful,' he said to Band. He closed the book and took a cigarette box out of his pocket. It was empty. 'Get me some cigarettes, will ya, kid?' he said. Band rushed off for cigarettes.

I'm just not a private person. It's not like I do things because I want things to be public it's just that's my way of expressing myself, and I happen to be very famous.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

You don't realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.

But I can't go out with a guy who's written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can't tell her. That's the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can't tell her that I'm okay.

you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them.

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.

For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around each other's brain.

God, you poets are full of shit. You have no idea what half the words you worship mean.

The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. But it's hard to know what to say next.

Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense.

Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.

I sat next to a woman called Tadi and I asked her what she would do with the shells she earned and she said her husband would use them to buy another wife. 'I cannot make this bag fast enough,' she said. We all fell over laughing.

Soon Paula would begin complaining that he didn't understand her, didn't appreciate her, didn't love her enough, when in fact he loved her so much his heart often felt shredded by it. But people always wanted words for all that roiled inside you.