Quotes About Communication

If only she would let me talk to her! I'm sure I could change her mind...That's what is needed, to change her mind. But how?

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.

Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.

Although she failed to grasp the meaning of this speech, she did understand that it might belong to the category of 'scoldings' and scenes of reproach or supplication, and her familiarity with men enabled her, without paying attention to the details of what they said, to conclude that they would not makes such scenes if they were not in love, that since they were in love it was pointless to obey them, they they would be only more in love afterward.

We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.

M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness.

Aliás, se o ciúme nos ajuda a descobrir certo pendor para a mentira na mulher que amamos, centuplica ele esse pendor quando a mulher descobre que somos ciumentos. Ela mente (em proporções como nunca nos tinha mentido antes), ou por pena, ou por medo, ou se furta instintivamente por uma fuga simétrica às nossas investigações.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.

The truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from.

And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech.

With the girls, on the other hand, if the pleasure which I enjoyed was selfish, at least it was not based on the lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone and prevents us from admitting that, when we chat, it is no longer we who speak, that we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people and not of a self that differs from them.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, it is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them.

That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life.

As coisas de que falamos o mais das vezes em tom de gracejo são geralmente, ao contrário, as que incomodam, mas não queremos mostrá-lo, com talvez a esperança inconfessada de uma vantagem suplementar: de justamente a pessoa com quem conversamos, ouvindo-nos gracejar daquilo, pensar que não é verdade.

La tristesse des hommes qui ont vieilli c'est de ne pas même songer à écrire de telles lettres dont ils ont appris l'inefficacité.

My mother repressed a shudder of apprehension, for, being more rapid in perception than my father, she grew alarmed on his account over things which only began to vex him a moment later. Whatever might cause him annoyance was first noticed by her, just as bad news of France is always known abroad sooner than among ourselves.

Assim trocamos palavras mentirosas. Mas uma verdade mais profunda do que a que diríamos se fôssemos sinceros pode às vezes ser expressa e anunciada por outro meio que não o da sinceridade.

You may not have heard, Duke, that there is a new word to describe that sort of attitude," said the archivist, who was Secretary to the Committee against Reconsideration, "One says 'mentality.' It means exactly the same thing, but it has the advantage that nobody knows what you're talking about. It's the ne plus ultra just now, the 'latest thing,' as they say.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

an excellent man, with whom I am sorry now that I did not converse more often, for, even if he cared nothing for the arts, he knew a great many etymologies)

I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know.