Quotes About Communication

This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?

Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.

I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns.

Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals.

Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other's rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them (not so much over the head as between the legs); and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable.

Archie says -Science- the same way he says -Modern-, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them.

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it.

I got something to tell you, said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.

Secondo l'esperienza di Archie, qualunque cosa dotata di memoria lunga mantiene i rancori, e non va per niente bene tenere animaletti domestici con ragioni di rancore (quella volta mi hai dato il cibo sbagliato, quell'altra mi hai fatto il bagno).

Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you're stoned.

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.

Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings—the ones we'd all previously used on paper—and they were keen to describe the surrounding scene, as if the new medium had made of everybody a writer. ("I'm typing this just by the window, looking out to blue-gray sea, where three gulls are diving into the water.")

Since that moment, one form of crisis has collided with another, and I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book. But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.

The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.

am so angry at you right now.

Once you almost said—to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring—you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.

Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me. Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves, and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one.

He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.