Quotes About Communication

Everything we ever said to each other was in languages I'm starting to forget.

Between our call and today he talked himself out of me, and now he is coming back around. 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 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. 1/13

Third date, I want to say, but I can't with Silas. Our dates are not self-conscious like that. We don't acknowledge that they're happening or say what they mean. IT all feels a bit haphazard and weightless, and to call attention to this might let out too much of the air.

I'm wondering how to tell him about Oscar. I want to know if it matters to him. IT seems like the only way to find out his feelings for me. It was easier to imagine doing this when he wasn't in the room, when he wasn't leaning over a table on his elbows, twisting up a chopstick wrapper with fingers that are unexpectedly familiar.

Silas leaves me a message, then another, and I don't call back. I've made my choice. I'm done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don't know or can't tell you what they want. I'm done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

He gripped the pages and told me they were all for me, about me, because of me. But when he was at the podium and I was in the first row, he never looked at me. When he read a poem about eating a peach on an overturned rowboat, the peach I'd brought, the rowboat where we'd sat together, he said it was for his mother, who loved peaches.

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.

Did he know? Of course he didn't. But for so long now when someone asked how she was they loaded it with pity and braced themselves for her reply, as if she had the power to hurt them with the truth.

No escribo porque tenga algo que contar. Escribo porque si no lo hago, todo empeora mucho más.

I don't write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don't, everything feels even worse

I don't think we should do this anymore.' 'Do what?' 'Go out.' He laughs and pulls me closer. 'What are you talking about?' I don't normally have to break up with anyone. Usually they do it for me, or I leave the state or the country. I don't have to spell it out very often.

I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.

Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?

How many of you guys, in your own experience with women, have learned that "no" means "yes" if you know how to spot it? Let me tell you something. In this modern world, that is simply not tolerated. People aren't even gonna try to understand that one. I mean, it used to be said it was a cliché. It used to be part of the advice young boys were given.

Music helps us to both articulate & express our emotions in a manner that's publicly acceptable.

A yellow oilskin jumped from a scooter, and walked purposefully towards him, notebook in hand. He couldn't have been more than eighteen, his face spotted adolescent red. 'You can't park there.' There was righteous indignation in his voice. ?Bill flashed his ID. 'Get lost or I'll book you!' ?The red blotches met one another in embarrassment. ?'Sorry officer.' ?He retreated to his scooter.

Muldoon referred to an invention that Menlo Parker was currently working on, designing a miniaturized portable radio-telephone which the Omega operatives could carry on their person at all times, and by which they could always get in touch with one another, and also tap into the public phone lines to contact the police, fire department, or ambulance. The invention was by no means yet perfected.

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.

I have found that it is not entirely safe, when one is misrepresented under his very nose, to allow the misrepresentation to go uncontradicted.

I believe I shall never be old enough to speak without embarrassment when I have nothing to talk about.

It follows as a matter of course that a half-hour answer to a speech of an hour and a half can be but a very hurried one.

It's a useful exercise to forbid yourself the use of keynote words such as 'fury' or 'jealous' when dramatizing an emotional condition.