Quotes About Communication

He'd turned to me, red-faced, and asked: 'If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?

free-form conversations that could eat up whole days.

Il romanzo e' una strada a due sensi dove la fatica che si richiede a entrambe le parti alla fine risulta uguale. Leggere, se lo si fa come si deve, e' difficile tanto quanto scrivere.

But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over.

What I have realized, is that the generations,' Samad continued as they sped through miles and miles of unchanging flatlands, 'they speak to each other, Jones. It's not a line, Life is not a line -- this is not palm-reading -- it's a circle, and they speak to us. That is why you cannot read fate; you must experience it.

It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.

Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully.

Oh my God — Fern — please! Stop talking like that! I don't want your heart! I don't want to be responsible for anybody else's heart. For anybody else's anything!' He looked confused: 'A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible.

Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

It was during this time that Archie learned the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life.

Don't give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!

The only thing to see is the obligatory third-world Coke billboard, ironic in exact proportion to the distance from its proper American context. This one says COKE—MAKE IT REAL. Just after the Coke sign there is a contrary sign, an indication that irony is not a currency in Liberia. It is worn by a girl who leans against the exit in a T-shirt that says THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD.

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. Like Garibaldi biscuits.

but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth. "What

Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1

Hey! 'Hey!' But there was no name to put on the end of Hey and a six foot two black man shouting Hey in a dense crowd does not create easiness wherever he goes.

It was during this time that Archie learnt the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life.

Harry surely hadn't meant to tell his only son that you couldn't accept black people to develop mentally like white people do. He had meant to say : I love you, I love my grandchildren, please stay another day.

With me he [Lamin] would wait till I finished each sentence, and leave long gaps of silence before he replied, silences I came to think of as conversational graveyards, where anything awkward or unpleasant I might have presented to him was sent to be buried.

It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could "put it over.

Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say.

What is happening in Africa (& elsewhere) is because the men did not listen to the women & the women did not listen to the women either & because the people did not listen to each other & themselves & because nobody listened to the children & the poets. - Alice Walker

How can two people love each other, create children together, cohabitiate, build a life together, and then end up hating each other in the end.

The most sincere feelings are the ones hardest to be expressed by words." —Unknown