Quotes About Communication

We actually respond to one another's energy more than to people's exact words or actions. In any situation, your taking or giving of energy is what you are actually doing. Everybody can feel, suffer, or enjoy the difference, but few can exactly say what it is that is happening. Why do I feel drawn or repelled? What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.

Even with all the best intentions in the world, given our different temperaments, backgrounds, and the way we process our data and information, we are going to step on one another's toes. Two people with absolutely good will can deeply hurt one another. Good people hurt one another because we all come at reality in different ways. That's why, for Jesus, the only way to achieve union is through forgiveness, not through making sin impossible.

If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis

I wondered if God might have an easier time using animals to communicate who God is, since they do not seem as willful and devious as we are.

The offended ones feel the need to offend back those who they think have offended them, creating defensiveness on the part of the presumed offenders, which often becomes a new offensive—ad infinitum. There seems to be no way out of this self-defeating and violent Ping-Pong game—except growing up spiritually.

Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn't interrupted?

She never answers during the day, Max explained. She lets her machine pick up. People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with, Miles told him. In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.

I hear you don't write any more, he says... Not true, I inform him. You should see the margins of my student papers. Not the same as writing a book though, right? Almost identical, I assure him. Both go largely unread.

La verdad no sirve como sustituto de una buena respuesta.

My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils.

Whereas some people's attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn't, Mrs. Whiting's implied that she knew everything you didn't. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.

Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I just wisht—" "What?" Rub sighed. Where to begin? "That I'd be nicer to you?" He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. "I wish I would, too," he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up.

She hadn't so much spoken the words as let them out of their cages….

he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, "Yes, dear.

He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.

Come sit on my lap. I want to hear all about your sexual harassment lunch. -Hank to his secretary, Rachel

There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn't understand something.

He's got a good, righteous head of steam up, and I envy him this. He's saying things that friendship has kept him from saying for twenty years, and their release at this late date is orgasmic. Asking him to stop would be like asking him to pull out.

Later in life, he was fond of remarking, rather ruefully, that he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, "Yes, dear.

Who are you talking to?" "This goose," I assure him. And in fact he looks relieved. "I was afraid you were talking to yourself.

They would be on the brink of a serious falling out when suddenly the danger would pass as if it had never existed—"like a fart in a gale of wind," as Dan liked to say. He had a way of saying the most patently offensive things, plain or profane, without offending. A rare gift, she concluded. The other men in her life somehow always managed to offend even when they were tiptoeing.

people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit-and-run posing as democracy in action.

He often did offend women without meaning to or even knowing how he'd managed.

Some phrases were truly magical in their ability to dredge up the past from the bottom of life's lake, and for Sully, like all errant fathers, "Don't tell your mother" was such a phrase. He hadn't used it in about thirty years. But the words were right there, anxious to be spoken again after so long, a holy incantation. It was the phrase he'd been born to speak