Quotes About Communication

This is the real gift of human language and our desire to connect: that it works.

I believe that poetry came into existence because people needed it—if it were easy to write down and record things without poetry, we wouldn't have needed poetry. But for some reason we did.

Don't we want more than anything to make something that reflects who we are and how we feel honestly enough that someone else might feel seen or acknowledged, and less alone?

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

People who asked questions didn't necessary like being asked questions.

A whale can injure another whale with its sonar. A whale can speak to another whale across sixty miles of ocean. A whale is as intelligent as we are, just in a way we can't quite measure or understand. Because we're these incredibly blunt instruments.

What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn't even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.

I didn't answer her. All I could have said was I don't know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.

Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.

Sometimes insight into character and dialogue means being silent.

You wouldn't understand me even if I made sense.

Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn't that what people did, if you were still alive?

A sudden flash of his partner Wyte, telling him he was compromised, him replying, "I don't have an opinion on that.

Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn't do the first thing that came into their heads.

She had a nice laugh, even when she was using it as a weapon against him.

Hellooo Pelican, come in, come in? No? Okay. You just be that way, you petulant bird.

Imagine that this communication sometimes lends a sense of the uncanny to the landscape because of the narcissism of our human gaze, but that it is just part of the natural world here.

If he'd had something to say, he should have picked up the phone a long time ago.

That's the problem with people who are not human. You can't tell how badly they're hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don't always know how to tell you.

Marriage isn't a vow to stop being interested in other people; it's a commitment as to how to handle that interest.

I have a couple of favorite relatives, but because they're so far away I tend to ignore them-even though they have mailboxes, email addresses and telephone numbers. Today, I'll get back in touch.

Silence is the hardest scream

Si no puede explicarlo de manera simple, es porque no lo ha entendido lo suficiente.

Argh? Pathetic and inarticulate. Nice combination. Your mothers must be so proud.