Quotes About Dialogue

Now I protest to thee, gentle reader, that I entirely dissent from Francisco de Ubeda in this matter, and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that if my quill displays no other properties of its mother-goose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have no occasion for discontent. From

The best way to reduce opponents' overconfidence and make them open to your position might seem to be an overwhelming argument that shows them why they are wrong and why you are right. Sometimes that works, but only rarely. What usually works better is to ask questions—in particular, to ask opponents for reasons. Questions are often more powerful than assertions.

In any reading experience there is an implied dialogue among author, narrator, the other characters, and the reader.

Listen more and speak less

communication simply requires

Who all is in there? Speak up and be quick about it!' 'A Methodist and a son a bitch!

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly.

Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius." "Quite," Anthony answered.

He thinks he can't participate in this race dialogue, because Asians haven't been persecuted as much as Black people.

Open a window in the SRO on a summer night and you can hear at least five dialects being spoken, the voices bouncing up and down the central interior courtyard, the courtyard in reality just a vertical column of interior-facing windows,

Genuine communication in the family is one of the hardest things in the world to learn

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

It was not you, it was your eyes – I spoke to them.

Silence is argument carried on by other means.

They were going to have a conversation, he realized. Archie didn't know a lot about women, but he had been married and he knew when a conversation was coming, and he knew when a woman wanted to have one, the best thing you could do was get it over with.

How can we have meaningful dialogue with adolescent girls when we live in a culture that still can't talk about tampons?

In all the years she'd been talking to houses, the houses had never talked back.

Only women think there is a reason to thank people if they listen to them.

We were talking a lot, but we weren't communicating at all.

Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument, an exchange of ignorance.

The word is mightier than the sword.

Audite et alteram partem

Power-seeking people are tuned in to the fact that questions steer the course of conversations and that the ones doing the asking are therefore in the driver's seat.