Quotes About Communication

the trouble was he had nothing to say, but he loved saying it.

Silence is full of speech.

Don't wear yourself out Dad. Is that your way of telling your old man to shut up?

Dolores seems to dwell only just inside language, she makes sentences the way a potter works clay, squashing them any which way into shapes that please her.

I always listen to everything you say. You have very authoritative hair.

Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.

The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.

The love that dares not speak its name has never stopped talking.

I realized that in order to touch the woman behind the grandmother I knew, the one who never spoke in a direct way about her past, I had to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present.

I had been privy to some of her intense sensory images, to her telescopic memory, to Genocide flashbacks. This was how she told me about her past. I think it was the only way she knew to speak to me about something she wanted to say, but couldn't say in any other language to a young boy, her eldest grandson.

He would never believe, in his wildest dreams ,that she no longer loved him. She had said it once, but he would dismiss these sorts of things as temperament or wine as if a bottle contained an infusion of foreign thoughts with which she had innocently poisoned herself.

The brain is a funny thing, the way it works, always looking for the most polite explanation...

Public facts are not like pebbles on the beach, lying in the sun and waiting to be seen. They must instead be picked, polished, shaped and packaged. Finally ready for display they the bear the marks of their shapers.

Riga. My father is still angry with you

but unable to help himself, he said sulkily, "It's the smiling

Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.

All military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the least he sends one of his own aides—he never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.

Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships.

The oft-repeated quip, "I'm sorry to write you a long letter, as I did not have time to write a short one," could be applied to meetings: "I'm sorry to imprison you in this long meeting, as I did not have time to prepare a short one.

The effective executive, therefore, asks: "What can my boss do really well?" "What has he done really well?" "What does he need to know to use his strength?" "What does he need to get from me to perform?" He does not worry too much over what the boss cannot do.

Mutual understanding can never be attained by "communications down," can never be created by talking. It can result only from "communications up." It requires both the superior's willingness to listen and a tool especially designed to make lower managers heard.

An excess of meetings indicates that jobs have not been defined clearly, have not been structured big enough, have not been made truly responsible. Also the need for meetings indicates that the decisions and relations analyses either have not been made at all or have not been applied. The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.

The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work.

Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates' colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.