Quotes About Communication

English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, its shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar—the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

Art is water, and just as humans are always close to water, for reasons of necessity (to drink, to wash, to flush away, to grow) as well as for reasons of pleasure (to play in, to swim in, to relax in front of, to sail upon, to suck on frozen, coloured and sweetened), so humans must always be close to art in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential. Otherwise we dry up.

I wish I could convey the perfection... But language founders in such seas

I have sired a well-adapted man (read: adapted to everyone except his father).

When a woman starts fussing over some physical defect, deny, deny, deny. Particularly if she says, "Tell me the truth.

Un des effets du dérèglement sentimental est que plus rien ne glisse. Tout devient signe, tout est matière à décryptage.

Elle aurait dû m'avertir. Je n'admets pas qu'elle m'ait trahi en secret.

In the end, the only truly intimate relationships are those between two people.

Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body.

The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.

Oh, to be laughed at when I have the courage to speak my heart. I don't want to live in a world like this. -from Diary of My Sixteenth Year

A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away.

One can't stop and suddenly speak to a complete stranger, can one?......When it happens I could die of sadness. I feel somehow empty and drained....

Is it a boy or a girl? It's a girl. Really! Can't you tell by looking at it? Is it mine? It is not. Oh? Well, if it is, you needn't say so now. You can say when you feel like it. Years and years from now. It is not. It really is not. I haven't forgotten that I loved you, but you are not to imagine things.

Was it as if a girl sound asleep, saying nothing, hearing nothing, said everything to and heard everything from an old man who, for a woman, was no longer a man?

And as we stray further from love we multiply the words, words and sentences so long and orderly. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.

People tend to suppress that which they cannot express.

I never said most of the things I said.

If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer.

Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying.

Life with another person is always difficult.

All kinds of daily interactions would be altered if we suspended our insufficiently informed conclusions over why others act the way they do.

Some people believe that too much information is a dangerous thing, but it is only this idea that is dangerous.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.