Quotes About Communication

I must have no pride whatsoever that I put up with your coldness

When a man speaks that way, people say he has authority. When a woman does, everyone resents her and thinks she's his mother. Or their nagging wife.

All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

People wanted one another to do something. They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else.

The voice. It doesn't just matter what you say. It matters who does the saying. It matters whose voice it is.

She sometimes said, "I don't know," even when she did know. What she meant was that it was more comfortable to stay in vagueness than to leave it.

Twitter. You know what it is? Termites with microphones.

Cuvintele conteaz?. Asta a spus doamna Quenell de la bun început. Cuvintele conteaz?. Întreg semestrul am c?utat cuvintele cu care s? spunem ceea ce trebuia s? spunem. Ne c?ut?m propria noastr? voce.

They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else. A word might land in a certain way; or maybe not even a word. Maybe a gesture, or a moment of listening.

Susannah was lonely; I knew that about her, could see it among all the other small trophies of unhappiness that she lined up on triumphant display for me, the way children often do, providing an entire museum of disappointments and inviting the parents in, as if to say: You see? You see how you fucked me up and what it led to? It led to this!

Dennis had fallen asleep before Jules got home, though he denied it in that strange way that people often deny they've been sleeping.

they talked day and night, as though inside them an endless scroll of paper were unraveling out through the mouth.

Male novelists made up words in their fiction: "phallomaterialism"; "ero-tectonics.

She sang along with them, her voice coming out in a loud quaver. But it didn't matter that you quavered; it only mattered that you made yourself heard.

Women were allowed to tell each other what they felt without holding back. Women could now say, "I love you," without any hesitation or discomfort or a sense that there were sexual overtones between them, even if one of them was gay.

strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit

Why not try to use your 'outside voice'? You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

We each have only one voice, and the world is so loud. Sometimes I think that the quiet ones have figured out that the best way to get other people's attention is not to shout, but to whisper. Which makes everyone listen a little harder.

Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously?

She had rarely called him honey, and he thought: This is weird. Honey was for a moment of extremeness. She had reached out from their usual vocabulary and into that of some other generation; the words that they usually used wouldn't do. Honey was weird, but it was a bridge across the terrifying open space between where they had been and where they now were. A honeyed bridge that would take them forward as best it could.

Eleanor and Franklin had had six children together, but apparently Eleanor had once described sex with her husband as "an ordeal to be borne".

When you realize, you have no idea what's going on in your kid's head? One morning, you wake up and there's this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They're something else that you don't know.

It was the best night ever. And they hadn't talked about any of it since.