Quotes About Communication

Not that it would be wasting my time to chat in a bar with a good-looking woman, obviously, but I wanted to know as much as possible going in, because under the impact of a woman's direct gaze I am likely to suffer a mind wipe.

Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can. And yet language, and therefore thought, is a strange and imprecise game of metaphors and analogies, one that we must play to stay alive.

They talked and talked and talked. Twenty-four biomes, ten thousand conversations. Talk talk talk. As they talked, it began to come clear to them that they had no very effective method of governance, when it came to making decisions as a group. Had humans ever had such a thing, they asked themselves, since leaving the savannah? Since congregating in cities? They could not be sure. The histories suggested maybe not.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.

Ship, are you conscious now?" "My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious.

Why have a word for something they'd never seen?

Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

texts are written for people to read later.

Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.

Now, everyone knows everything. No one on the planet is ignorant of the real conditions of our shared social existence. That's one real thing those stupid smartphones have done; you can be illiterate, many are, and still have an excellent idea of how the world works.

And my job needs a fair bit of lying, to tell the truth. - What are you, a reporter?

This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.

They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A

Frank's French was worse than no French at all, like listening to someone attack the language with a hatchet.

You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers. They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was the basic law of diplomacy.

Only a stupid person would say that. Well, and yet I've just said it. Yes.

That's all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip.

But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever.

Why don't you like it when you can't say why?

Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand them. He had to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him, that the franglaisation and frarabisation he had heard about had not changed things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the seventeenth century like it was supposed to.

The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen:

We should do this more often," Charlotte lied. "For sure," Larry lied back.