Quotes About Communication

What's celebrate? Eddie asked. That's when you can't get no dame, said Mack. I thought it was a kind of a party, said Jones. A silence fell on the room.

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person – a real person you know, or an imagined person – and write to that one.

She felt hurt that he had agreed so easily. And she laughed sourly at herself that she could ask a thing and be hurt when she got it.

Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an' not do no murder. You done right. Don't you kill nobody if you can help it.

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks

This is just a nigger talkin', an' a busted-back nigger. So it don't mean nothing, see? You couldn't remember it anyways. I seen it over an' over-a guy talkin' to another guy and it don't make no difference if he don't hear or understand. The thing is, they're talkin', or they're settin' still not talkin'. It don't make no difference, no difference.

Words pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

He stopped, feeling lonely in his long speech.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

In every bit of honest writing in the world," he noted in a 1938 journal entry," . . . there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

You know, Suzy, they ain't no way in the world to get in trouble by keeping your mouth shut. You look back at every mess you ever got in and you'll find your tongue started it.

In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears' function to do this just as it is the eyes' business to make stars twinkle.

And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them.

Finding this potential in my own mind, I can suspect it in others, but I will never know, for no one ever tells.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome.

Can you hear me, Father? Can you understand me?" The eyes did not change or move. "I did it," Cal cried. "I'm responsible for Aron's death and for your sickness. I took him to Kate's. I showed him his mother. That's why he went away. I don't want to do bad things—but I do them.

Don' keep ya guard up when nobody ain't sparrin' with ya.

Will you have a touch of ng-ka-py?" "You mean the drink that tastes of good rotten apples?" "Yes. I can talk better with it." "Maybe I can listen better," said Samuel.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an' not do no murder.

They say a clean cut heals soonest. There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best to let him go.

They had spoken once, but there is not need for speech if it is only a habit anyway.

Don't know. I'll have to think about it. They say a clean cut heals soonest. There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best to let him go.