Quotes About Dialogue

Why does this not occur routinely? Don't we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued.

If you are trying to develop a good relationship and feel the conversation starting to go in the wrong direction, you can humbly ask some version of "Are we OK?" "Is this working?" or "What is happening here?" to explore what might be going wrong and how it might be improved.

Humble Inquiry works only if the attitude behind it includes the desire to really hear what the other person says, to develop an appropriate level of empathy, and to choose a response that shows interest and curiosity.

Humble Inquiry goes beyond mere questioning and displays an attitude of interest and curiosity that hopefully engenders a similar reciprocal demeanor of curiosity in the other person in the conversation. You can open the door to a relationship through your own Humble Inquiry, yet a relationship only flourishes if that attitude is reciprocated.

we must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It

Telling is only an investment if you know for sure that what you are telling is of value to the other person. That is why it is safest to tell only if you have been asked, rather than arrogantly deciding on your own to tell somebody something.

Telling puts the other person down. It implies that the other person does not already know what I am telling and that the other person ought to know it.

Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Even their voices go up at the end of a declarative sentence

Not speak however silently, But my hushed voice will answer Thee

Y desde dónde nos llama, señora Cargols? Desde Sant Joan Despí.

If you hope for any sort of dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or radical side of politics, you must cease from silly verbal abuse. If you don't want it, then we go on as we are, fractious and impotent.

Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

It's good to talk.

Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.

Shell to DOS... Come in DOS, do you copy Shell to DOS...

The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.

I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.

Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent.

sociological research is part of a continuous 'two-way' process between sociologists and the subjects they study.

He was like an actor in one of those plays from between the wars where everyone talks for a long time but very little happens.

could imagine Akira Anno and Alain Badiou together, talking into the small hours. I'm sure it would have been a barrel of laughs.

It's hard to care about a character who talks in clichés. They also look so much less interesting than their American counterparts, with their white shirts, stab vests and those hopeless blue helmets. No guns. No sunglasses. These two policemen were young and earnest. One was Asian, the other white. They hardly spoke to us again. One of them took out his radio and called in the situation while Hawthorne set about examining the room for himself.

'2001: A Space Odyssey' - I'd watched and hated it seven times before it provided the first 'religious experience' I'd ever had watching a film. Finally, I was able to pick up on what the film was transmitting almost entirely through dialogue.