Quotes About Communication

But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden.

But she, in a sense, had betrayed him first. If she hadn't been so supportive of his failings, he might have made peace long ago.

She noted with pleasure that he'd already dispensed with a salutation

Enid and Sylvia resumed relations stiffly, their emotional muscles pulled and aching from last night's overuse.

A drawback of email was that you could only delete it once: couldn't crumple it up, fling it to the floor, stomp on it, rip it to shreds, and burn it. Was there anything crueler, from the person who'd rejected you, than compassionate forbearance?

Un inconvenient del correu electrònic és que només el pots esborrar una vegada: no pots arrugar-lo, rebotre'l contra el terra, trepitjar-lo, fer-ne mil bocins i cremar-lo. Hi podia haver alguna cosa més cruel, per part d'algú que t'acabava de rebutjar, que una paciència compassiva?

Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don't fall behind with email.

Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.

Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since they were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate.

They rode an elevator in silence. Too-precipitous intimacy had left in its wake a kind of dirty awkwardness.

If you really want to change someone's mind on a moral or political matter, you'll need to see things from that person's angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person's way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

It is always better to clear the air, even if the air often stinks.

People have to be patient when they're talking to a nervous person.

They got stoneder and stoneder and quit talking.

La calidad de una cena la determinan las conversaciones secundarias que la mayoría de la mesa no oye.

Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24)

This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.

To tugboat was to try Minna's patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. Tugboating was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one. Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art.

Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.

there was language everywhere; you could read the city, the city was a grammar

on the one hand there's mansplaining, and on the other, there's the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.

She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.

Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut?