Quotes About Interaction

Men are often (though not always) the pursuers for sex, just like women are often (though not always) the pursuers for conversation.

Are you a good listener? Do you ask questions that help the other person become a better communicator? Do people feel comfortable around you, or do you dominate conversations?

Ever notice how amused people are when you point out one of their mannerisms or a funny quirk about them? They start laughing and getting happy because they're thinking, "People notice me! I'm relevent!" It's OK to have these instincts, but you have to suppress them a bit. There are 6 billion people here, so it's not all about you. You need to let other people talk for a while and pay attention to their world for a sec.

How is one ever to know why a perfect stranger is kind beyond the call of duty or else inexplicably rude?

He's very private now," commented Brian. "He communicates by emails when there's a business discussion, but that's it.

Emotional expression governs, and changes, interaction. Anger, for example, produces distance, whereas vulnerability disarms. Thus, interpersonal conflict can be resolved by changing what people express

you would only laugh at me, not because my thoughts were stupid, but because I was so foolish as to attempt to tell them to you. If

Have you ever tried to hold the gaze of someone who's just complimented you? It's hard as hell. At least I think it was a compliment.

At every point in the story of the transmission of biblical material from the original text to today we are dealing with the interaction of men and women with God. At every point, human judgment and human fallibility are involved, as they are in every attempt we make today to act faithfully in new situations. The idea that at a certain point in this long story a line was drawn before which everything is divine word and after which everything is human judgment is absurd.

Why are you talking to them, they're not important! Brownnose this one! He can HELP you!

the various currents are not isolated entities.

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.

It was Italy after all. People probably hit each other all the time.

You don't learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

Even on the first day we invaded Plover's house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they're too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely.

For all that it was a party at Maude Chatwin's house, it was also just a party like any other party. There were pretty people and unpretty people, drunk people and undrunk people, people who didn't care what anybody thought about them and people standing in corners afraid to open their mouths lest somebody look directly at them.

or maybe Eliot had decided that the tedium of solitude was ever so slightly greater than the tedium of Quentin's company.

They moaned a bit at each other, as one does

That got some appreciative laughter, though he wasn't joking, and the bird didn't laugh. It didn't answer him either. Quentin couldn't read its face; like all birds, it had only one expression.

She was especially confident when it came to pointing out other people's mistakes. Not that she was a know-it-all—it didn't seem to be an ego thing with her. She just assumed that everybody shared her desire for everybody to be clear on everything, and she'd expect you to do the same for her.

They spent the rest of that afternoon together. Maybe he felt guilty for giving Quentin the cigarette, or maybe Eliot had decided that the tedium of solitude was ever so slightly greater than the tedium of Quentin's company. Maybe he just needed a straight man. He

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full

All really frank people are amusing, and would remain so if they could remember that other people may sometimes want to be frank and amusing too.