Quotes About Communication

Stories get their name from how they should be used, not what should be written.

Try showing up at your doctor's office and giving her your "requirements." Tell her the prescriptions you'd like written and the operations you'd like scheduled. If she's nice, she'll smile and say, "That's interesting; tell me where it hurts.

Try to make your working relationships much more like a good doctor-patient relationship, and much less like a waiter-diner's.

Stories get their name not from how they're supposed to be written, but from how they're supposed to be used.

If you're not getting together to have rich discussions about your stories, then you're not really using stories.

the real value of stories isn't what's written down on the card. It comes from what we learn when we tell the story.

We can both read the same document, but have a different understanding of it.

This is a workshop, not in a meeting. Meeting is the word that has become a euphemism for unproductive collaboration.

She looked at me like I was stupid and said to me one last time with an air of finality, "They're requirements." It was at that moment that I learned that the word requirements actually means shut up. For a great many people, that's exactly what requirements do. They stop conversations about people and the problems we're solving. The truth is, if you build a fraction of what's required you can still make people very happy.

Shared understanding is when we both understand what the other person is imagining and why.

The real goal of using stories is shared understanding.

I've actually tried to roast somebody that I don't like, and it doesn't go well. Either they're a bad sport or I'm not as funny as I could be.

Mrs. Cooke reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his phone, and threw it with all her force onto the asphalt.

And so, pointing fingers become pointing guns, because nobody listens to fingers.

Quick words did not always mean a quick mind.

Men with power either trumpet to everyone just how powerful they are, or they use that power effectively by keeping quiet about it, and going about their duties.

Anger is simply momentary madness, and sometimes there is strength in silence. After all, he is only throwing words, not stones.

Talking with her was like listening to a ballad on a radio station that fades in and out as you drive, sometimes clear and sentimental and tuned perfectly to the passing land, sometimes filled with static, lost, a song played too many times.

She tucked her chin to her chest and looked at me like I was a Neanderthal. Except I remembered that scientists had recently discovered that Neanderthals were actually probably capable of complex thought and communication so that analogy wouldn't work anymore.

Fone Bone: HOLD IT! Thorn thinks Gran'ma Ben can help us get back to Boneville! Phoney Bone: IT'S NOT WORTH IT! LET GO OF ME! Fone Bone: Would you wait a minute?!! We can explain everything! Phoney Bone: HELP! HELP! They've destroyed my cousin's brain!! OH MY GOSH! THey've already milked you haven't they?!!

This is a really lame exchange of hidden messages.

If you really want to shoot me, go ahead, but shooting your driver is one of the stupidest possible ways anybody could ever die.

God, Owen, what have you done?" asked Toby, stepping onto the lawn. "Why do things always get so screwed up with us?" Owen signed: Scared. "Me too.

I realized I was ignoring my girlfriend. I couldn't remember, was it two in the pink and one in the stink? Three in the pink and two in the stink? How many went in the stink?" ~ Jeff strand