Quotes About Communication

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.

It is not that addresses at the opening of a battle make the soldiers brave. The old veterans scarcely hear them, and recruits forget them at the first boom of the cannon. Their usefulness lies in their effect on the course of the campaign, in neutralizing rumors and false reports, in maintaining a good spirit in the camp, and in furnishing matter for camp-fire talk. The printed order of the day should fulfill these different ends.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.

We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us.

Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.

La novela que yo escribí es una novela sin puntos ni comas. No tenía ganas de ponérselas. Y explico por qué. Las comas son como los pasos. Los pasos producen cansancio y yo no tenía ganas de cansarme, me sentía sin fuerzas y no quería caminar, sino sentarme y recostarme.

I don't keep my secrets or my knowledge to myself.

Touch is... one of the most ancient transactions, a defiance of the plasma membrane and the loneliness it brought.

We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches.

Reach out of the deep chasm of your loneliness and express yourself to another human being.

Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth, and it spreads out from the page into all of our life, and it should

Writing is 100% listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. if you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else.

It's a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.

Writing is egalitarian; it cuts across geographic, class, gender, and racial lines.

Ninety percent of writing is about listening.

My desolation was that no one knew me and I did not know myself. My family's life was my life. I knew nothing else. I was clothed, fed, given a bed to sleep in, encouraged to marry early and rich, and loved in a generic way -- I was "the big one," which meant the older and my sister was the 'little one" --but no one spoke to me, no one explained anything.

Entire wars have been based on our inability to see.

I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

When I was in nursery school, the teachers asked me, y'know, 'What does your dad do for a living?' So I said 'He helps women get pregnant!' They called my mom and they were like, 'What exactly does your husband do?'

If you'd only let me come by myself, none of this would have happened. Having you around makes everything worse.' She buried her head under her pillow. 'Stop it! you're so cold! You're heartless, you little robot!' The pillow muffled her words, but they still stung. 'I feel things,' I said. 'I'm not a robot!' I stamped my foot and screamed. Then I burst into tears. I touched the wet little drops and held them toward her. 'See, I'm not a robot. This is proof.

I have a rotary phone from the sixties, it take forever to dial, which keeps me from making impulsive calls.