Quotes About Pauses

More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae. What is the virtue of speaking Japanese, Lafcadio Hearn noted, if you cannot think in Japanese?

Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue - there's this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.

Expressive speech, with modulation in pitch and volume, and a minimum of noticeable pauses, boosts credibility and enhances the impression of intelligence.

I didn't have a special secret about Sarah Palin. I just had a feeling and some concerns. Her blank stares and her lashing out in some interviews, I think, gave voters pause about her, too.

Like most Lebanese, Joumana speaks rapidly, one sentence dovetailing into another, producing guttural words and phrases as if gargling with mouthwash. I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversations with many pauses, pauses replacing words.

They didn't finish each other's sentences, rather it was the pauses they shared.

It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.

The most precious things in speech are pauses.

Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.

The most precious things in speech are the pauses.

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

Small talk is an art in the Michigan U.P., since most things that happen here are small. Long silences are okay, too. Most of what's said will be said again tomorrow. The weather, gardening, and the no-good federal government are all good topics, interspersed with pauses and throat clearings. It's our way of life.

The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.

When I'm writing stuff, I need to watch the scene in my head, like a little movie, or else it just feels stupid. It just feels very written. There are things that actors do and faces they make and pauses they take and their rhythms. You need that.

They heard each other only by accident, in brief pauses for breath, each of them howling their resentment and pain across the room like flaming spears that burned into dust before touching their target.

OH, I LIKE smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don't suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they?

Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe.

There were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark.

Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go?

Interruptions are the spice of life.

Shatner commas: Oddly placed commas that don't seem to serve any actual purpose in punctuation, but make it look like you should take odd pauses, as William Shatner does when delivering lines.

Inside a tent her voice was shrill enough to sour yak butter. She was no longer gasping, which I missed because the pauses gave my ears a chance to rest. I

It's dangerous to accept crisis as your baseline. It gets harder and harder to see the anti-crises that are so requisite to happiness: the quiet times, the crucial pauses - like those in a poem.

All pauses in space, a violent compression of meaning in an instant within the meaningless.