Quotes About Communication

Texts are teachers.

writing is performance.

In writing, authors use modes to make meaning and clarity.

Let others do your work for you. Use quotes, anecdotes, information from other authorities; let them carry your message across. —Vladimir Nabokov

Metaphors Be With You

Writing is not about impressing; it is about expressing.

I always thought that if those psychic phone lines were for real, I could just call them and not say a word and the psychic on the other end of the phone would rattle off my vital statistics, then tell me all about my future.

Pretty hard to see when you refuse to look. Pretty hard to hear when you refuse to listen.

In speech, the speaker and the listener have to be present in at least two senses:- A Present to the words in a spatial sense B Present at a particular moment in time in which the words are uttered. Therefore it seems that the speakers' thoughts are as close as possible to their words. The thoughts are present to the words. So speech offers the most direct access to consciousness. The voice can seem to be consciousness itself.

Différance is actively disruptive. Language, thought and meaning aren't to be allowed the comfort of their daily routines. If that leaves philosophical language ruined, sick with its own instabilities, what about ordinary language and everyday communication? Can we rely on grounded decidability in the supermarket, the office and the lecture hall?

lost. So the /p/ is in a way present, though not simply so. It is carried as a trace in the /b/, necessarily

Concepts need their physical sounds, their scripted marks, etc. Even if we can imagine words "inside our head", we are conjuring their signifiers, their sensory aspects.

Derrida has argued that communication is always subject to iterability, citation and grafting. If so, it can't be taken as a guaranteed, masterable passage of meanings. Language, Derrida says, is a "non-masterable dissemination". If that's the case, we lose absolute assurance that we can "say what we mean" or "know what someone is thinking".

The difficult part of knowledge is not stating a fact, but representing that fact in a useful way.

Chinese Room

I let it ring. I wanted to breathe for a few minutes, and I could think of nothing that couldn't wait. Besides, I had paid almost $50 for an answering machine. Let it earn its keep.

I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.

I don't know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

I had killed our careful relationship by driving my tongue through its heart and pushing it off a cliff.

Getting yelled at by a furious woman should be a semi-formal occasion.

When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.

A reasonable being might think that he and I could find some common ground; have a cup of coffee and compare our Passengers, exchange trade talk and chitchat about dismemberment techniques. But no: Doakes wanted me dead. And I found it difficult to share his point of view.

Have you ever noticed that every now and then you'll overhear an amazingly clear declarative sentence when you're out in public, spoken with such force and purpose that you absolutely yearn to know what it means, because it is just so forceful and crystalline? And you want to follow along behind whoever just spoke, even though you don;t know them, just to find out what that sentence means and how it would affect the lives of the people involved?

This whole business of telling the truth just never seems to work without some kind of awkward unpleasantness.