Quotes About Communication

asking myself from time to time if it might be possible to teach English in such a way that people would stop killing each other

No matter how close people get, they never reach each other. Including us now. Even now, there's a place where each of us is alone.

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

Their haste pulls them out of the conversation, or they try internally to improve the situation, or they're preparing what their next speech will be when you shut up and it's their turn to take the stage.

like many elderly people, she has developed a selective sense of hearing. She ignores me and continues on her own track...

This could be one reason I've never burdened my life with children—I've thought too much about why people lose the courage to look each other in the eye.

Very few people know how to listen. Their haste pulls them out of the conversation, or they try internally to improve the situation, or they're preparing what their entrance will be when you shut up and it's their turn to step on stage.

I sit there in total silence. It's always interesting to leave Europeans in silence. For them it's a vacuum in which the tension grows and converges toward the intolerable.

You can learn something about your fellow human beings from what they write in the margin

Skriv, sa hon. "Din kropp betyder mer för mig än allt randigt fläsk som finns på Smithfield Charkuterimarknad.

In my judgment, we suffer quite as much from exaggerated, hysterical, and untruthful or slanderous statements in the press as from any wrongdoing by businessmen or politicians.

corridor, supposedly out of earshot, about the meeting they had just taken part in. Then we asked the team playing themselves to do the same. This enactment

Two caveats about this collective brainwashing need stressing. First, it did not necessarily change what older people thought, but it decisively changed what they would say or do.

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

No 'buts', Gilbert. You just make sense to me. It's nothing more special than that.

smiles and friendly nods are like fabric softeners for the face.

Wait a minute, I'm thinking, was this another one of those conversations where what is meant and what is being said are not the same thing?

Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.

Is it possible to love by simply not being an ass? I don't think so. But it goes a long way to clearing a space where love can happen.

You know just one cough, he says. That's what they said at the end. Not just through blood. Sharing bodily fluids. I'm not fucking a Mennonite. A cough is a bodily fluid. Land in your eye. Open your mouth to speak.

Wynn had seen it before: injured people who had barely enough energy to shift a little, to eat, but not enough to talk. Strange that words took so much life force.

Rasha had been employed by two different Chinese shops, and she said that after this experience she would never work for an Egyptian. She described the Chinese as direct and honest, and she appreciated their distance from local gossip networks. "They keep their secrets," she said.

All the women who worked in the shops were unmarried, and invariably they were fascinated by the relationships of their foreign bosses. "They're equal," Rasha, the assistant at the Chinese Lingerie Corner, said about the couple whom she worked for. "And they discuss things. They have arguments, but they talk about it. Egyptians just try to dominate.

Those who write where many read, and speak where many listen, had best be careful what they say. Someone is bound to take them seriously, and it really is no good pretending that you didn't know this.