Quotes About Communication

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

If your world does not include enough access to different people, and their world does not include enough access to you, you are speaking from ignorance.

I'm not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.

The enemy is noise. The goal is clarity.

Given humans' tendency to see themselves as the pivots around which all creatures' lives spun, the bewildered travelers assumed the wolves were talking to them.

I think there needs to be a meeting to set an agenda for more meetings about meetings.

Not responding is a response.

The world can be divided between people who can get a waiter's attention and those who can't.

Your story is your soul. The longer you're with someone, the more you trust them, the more you're willing to tell. I believe when you find your real partner, you tell them everything until there's nothing left. Then you start from the beginning again, only this time it's their story as well as yours.

Sure, he's an ass, but remember, I have to live in their house. Anyway, that's how you treat people like that: Make 'em know how dumb they are, and they go away feeling a little less pleased with themselves.

To, ?e milcz?, nie znaczy, ?e nie mam nic do powiedzenia.

I am fifty-five years old, and believe God is willing to listen if we speak clearly and to the point. His responses are manifested, not in immediate answers or results, but in dots everywhere around us that need to be connected intelligently.

cerca di non arrabbiarti troppo con chi pensa di conoscerti meglio di quanto tu conosca te stesso. Ha buone intenzioni.

Can you make her out at all?' Benjamin shrugged. As usual, in Cicely's presence, he was afraid of appearing inarticulate, and as usual, this fear robbed him of his power of speech.

Interesting little phrase though, isn't it though open marriage? Makes it sound like a drain, or a sewer.

Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.

Conoce esa sensación? Seguro que sí: tropezarse con un artista cuyo trabajo te habla tan directamente que es como si los dos compartieran el mismo lenguaje cómplice, y eso a la vez te reafirmara en lo que siempre has pensado y te dijera algo completamente nuevo. (...) ¿No la ha sentido, entonces?

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness." (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners

Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.

there are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.

Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying, Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.