Quotes About Communication

That's why contraception is wrong by nature: it's a limit, a "Wait! Hold! No! Not quite! We won't give each other Everything")

All metaphors limp.

The family that fights together stays together.

war between paralyzed telepaths.

God is a God who speaks!

Rock star do not jump! The launch was cutting sharply, its skipper calling out a phrase that bore no relationship to the English language as Amy knew it. Rock star in a hurry! Nellie replied, one foot on the boat's gunwale.

Whoa, don't assume, dude, Marco said. My mom always said, when you assume you make an ass of u and me --

Aly hugging me, and me not hugging back, which was awkward beyond belief. I tried to wrap my arms around her but they collided in midair trying to find a place to settle, until my back plowed into the side of an open door. "Are you two all right?" Cass said. "Or is this Zombie Dance Night at the hospital?" Aly and I let go of each other. I could feel my face burning.

She's hot and smart," Marco said. "So, you think she's hot, too?" Aly said. Daria turned to Marco with a smile. "Not hot. Is cool in the morning." I looked at the ground to avoid cracking up.

Aly put hers on top of mine. "I feel it." I flinched, yanking my hand back. "What happened?" Aly said. "Nothing," I said. "You startled me." Aly narrowed her eyes at me. "You're turning red." "No, I'm not." I turned away. "You . . . said you felt something. What did you feel?" "Warmth," she said. I swallowed. "Warmth?

I screamed, which means I can't tell you the actual words.

What is that instrument?" Aly asked the head guard. When he returned a blank stare, she pantomimed playing the instrument. "A zither?" "Santur," he said.

The way Dad's face changes. The darkness. The words. The news that tells me what has just happened in a place at the bottom of the world. What does "crevasse" mean? I am shouting now. Screaming. WHAT DOES "CREVASSE" MEAN? I wanted it to go away. Every part of me, every nerve in my brain, was trying to dull the image, to shove it away, make it disappear.

To break the chain of mistrust, someone has to go first. I am happy to make the move.

The old lady told us Do not wake Ruhan', Jake replied, but who knew Ruhan was a chimpanzee? Apparently I said something that sounded like 'I ate your bananas' in Estonian.

When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that "someone screwed up.

Chris Argyris criticized "good communication that blocks learning," arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because "they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.

To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive.

The artistry of dialogue lies in experiencing the flow of meaning and seeing the one thing that needs to be said now. Like the Quakers, who enjoin members to say not simply whatever pops into their heads but only those thoughts that are compelling (and which cause the speaker to quake from the need to speak them)

The purpose of dialogue," Bohm suggests, "is to reveal the incoherence in our thought." There are three types of incoherence.

A shared vision is the first step in allowing people who mistrusted each other to begin to work together. It creates a common identity.

For example,when a conflict surfaces in a dialogue people are likely to realize that there is a tension, but the tension arises, literally, from our thoughts. People will say, "It is our thoughts and the way we hold on to them that are in conflict, not us.

we must allow multiple visions to coexist, listening for the right course of action that transcends and unifies all our individual visions. As one highly successful CEO expressed it: "My job, fundamentally, is listening to what the organization is trying to say, and them making sure that it is forcefully articulated.

If one member of a team sees a problem more systemically than others, that person's insight will get reliably discounted—if for no other reason than the intrinsic biases toward linear views in our normal everyday language.