Quotes About Communication

Had he not warned me when I forgot my own notebook that the ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able to write?

Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home." They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying. It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight. He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.

De fiecare dat? aceste rug?minÈ›i pentru prezenÈ›a lui nu au f?cut decât s?-mi înt?reasc? conÈ™tiinÈ›a t?cerii definitive care ne-a desp?rÈ›it.

I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening

She didn't know the songs, I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience.

I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day.

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people," she said. "The hardest is with one.

All I know about grammar is its infinite power.

What would I give to be able to discuss anything at all with John? What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy? What would that small thing be? If I had said it in time would it have worked?

Devi avere sempre ragione? , ricordai che John diceva. Era una lamentela, un'accusa, parte di una contesa. Non aveva mai capito che dentro di me non avevo mai ragione.

There was a way to know if you had made headway. You knew you had made headway, when a doctor to whom you had made one or another suggestions, presented, a day later, the plan as his own.

That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude, and it was characteristic of Charlotte that whenever the phrase realistic but optimistic appeared in a school communique she read it as realistic and optimistic.

There were, early on, certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well handled by the press.

I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company.

Dear Joan, the letter begins, although the writer did not know me at all.

Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

The newspapers, censored, managed to report these rumors by carrying stories in which they deplored the spreading of rumors, or, as the newspapers put it, the propagation of falsehoods detrimental to public security. In order to deplore the falsehoods it was of course necessary to detail them, which was the trick.

My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as "Joan's husband." Marriage is the classic betrayal.

I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.