Quotes About Communication

I don't know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You'd be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused.

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn't disappointed.

You can't undo something that's happened; you can't take back a word that's already been said out loud.

I knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first.

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fesh and honest. Whe you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

I wonder if the conversations you've never had with someone count, if you've been over them a thousand times in your mind.

I know Mark,' I reply. 'And I don't like him.' 'But I do. And part of being social means being civil to someone you don't like.' 'That's stupid. It's a huge world. why not just get up and walk away?' 'Because that's rude,' Jess explains. 'I think it's rude to stick a smile on your face and pretend you like talking to someone when in reality you'd rather be sticking bamboo slivers under your fingernails.

sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.

We pretend that we know our children, because it's easier than admitting the truth--from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers. It's far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it's safer to say you're a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you.

It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)

We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.

The best parenting advice I ever got was from a labor nurse who told me the following: 1. After your baby gets here, the dog will just be a dog. 2. The terrible twos last through age three. 3. Never ask your child an open-ended question, such as Do you want to go to bed now? You won't want to hear the answer, believe me. Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed? That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.

Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.

There are five things we need to say to people we love before they die…: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye.

It takes two people to make a friendship work

The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we're desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There's the telephone, and the fax - and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You've got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: we take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.