Quotes About Communication

My words therefore did not reflect my feelings in the least. If the reader has only a faint impression of this, that is because, as narrator, I describe my feelings to him at the same time as repeating my words. But if I were to hide the former from him so that he heard only the latter, my actions, which corresponded so little to my words, would so often give him the impression of strange changes in direction that he would think me almost mad.

To my ear, Bergotte's way of speaking was completely different from his way of writing; and even the things he said differed from the things that fill his books. A voice emerges from a mask; unaided, it is not up to showing us immediately a face we have glimpsed naked in a style.

She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: "It's not the same thing, you see, with him," and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

The truth which one puts into one's words does not make a direct path for itself, is not supported by irresistible evidence.

But the intensity of her mimicry could not fill the place of that light which is absent from our eyes so long as we do not understand what people are talking to us about.

Let us simply recall the wish to appear natural and forthcoming, the instinctive movement to conceal a secret lovers' meeting, a mixture of modesty and ostentation, the need to speak of what is so pleasant to ourselves and to show that we are loved, a partial understanding of what the other person already knows, or guesses, which, outrunning or falling short of his understanding, constantly over- or under-estimates it, the involuntary drive to take risks or to cut one's losses.

It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters which we receive from a person are more or less similar and combine to trace an image of the writer so different from the person whom we know as to constitute a second personality.

When I talked with any one of my friends I was conscious that the original, the unique portrait of her individuality had been skilfully traced, tyranically imposed on my mind as much by the inflexions of her voice as by those of her face, and that these were two separate spectacles which rendered, each in its own plane, the same single reality.

Não há nada como o desejo para impedir que as coisas que se dizem possuam qualquer semelhança com o que se tem no pensamento.

Inasmuch as a great part of what doctors know is taught them by the sick, they are easily led to believe that this knowledge which patients exhibit is common to them all, and they fondly imagine that they can impress the patient of the moment with some remark picked up at a previous bedside.

I was struck for the first time by this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of expression.

There was only one thing she would not do for me, a thing she would have done only at the time when I would have cared nothing for it, and which she would have happily done then for that very reason: that is, tell me the truth.

whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed.

Nas?l ki baz? yarat?klar, tabiat?n üretmekten vazgeçti?i bir canl? türünün son örnekleriyse, acaba –dil, kelimeler, dü?üncelerin çözümlenmesi icat edilmemi? olsa–ruhlar aras?nda mevcut olabilecek ileti?imin yegâne örne?i de müzik mi diye dü?ünüyordum. Müzik, devam? gelmemi? bir olas?l?k gibidir; insanl?k ba?ka yollara, konu?ma ve yaz? diline sapm??t?r.

I told Morel, thinking to interest him, that M. de Norpois was a friend of my father. But not a movement of his features shewed that he had heard me, so little did he think of my parents, so far short did they fall in his estimation of what my great-uncle had been, who had employed Morel's father as his valet, and, as a matter of fact, being, unlike the rest of the family, fond of not giving trouble, had left a golden memory among his servants

She remembered all the years in which my grandmother and she had refrained from speaking to me about my work and the need for a healthier way of life which, I used to say, the agitation into which their exhortations threw me alone prevented me from beginning, and which, notwithstanding their obedient silence, I had failed to pursue.

When the compartments in which we live parts of our lives are too different from one another, we can expend ourselves on a person who, by the following day, may come to seem uninteresting. But we feel responsible for what we may have said the night before, and wish to honor it.

was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are loved.

De schoonzus van een van mijn vriendinnen heeft onlangs telefoon in haar huis laten aanleggen! [...] Ik zal je eerlijk bekennen dat ik listen en lagen verzonnen heb om ook eens een keer door het toestel te mogen komen spreken. Ik vind het heel aantrekkelijk, maar toch meer bij een vriendin dan bij mij thuis. Daar zou ik geloof ik niet graag een telefoon willen hebben. Als het eerste nieuwtje eraf is, wordt dat gebel waarschijnlijk een plaag.

the lie that tries to have us believe we are not inescapably alone in the world, and which, when we converse with someone, prevents us from admitting that it is not we who are speaking, that at such times we try to take on the semblance of other people, rather than be the self that differs from them.

Albertine would in any case either not have given me any answer or else a "no" in which the "n" would have been too hesitant and the "o" too resonant. Albertine never recounted facts that might harm her,

Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves!

O que chamamos nossa conduta permanece ignorado de nosso mais próximo vizinho; o que esquecemos haver dito, ou que até nunca dissemos, vai provocar hilaridade até num outro planeta, e a imagem que os outros formam de nossos gestos e atitudes tampouco se parece com a que nós próprios formamos, como um desenho, um decalque malfeito, e onde ora a um traço negro corresponde um espaço vazio, e a um branco, um contorno inexplicável.