Quotes About Conversation

But isn't it clear that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of that fraction known as happiness? And what sense would there be in all the numberless victims of the 200 Years War if there still remained in our life some cause for envy? But some cause did remain, because noses remained, the button noses and classical noses mentioned in that conversation on our walk, and because there are some whose love many people want, and others whose love nobody wants.

I was born to schmooze.

Memorize a simple strategy: Don't jump to speak, ask questions and listen, watch your anger thermometer and keep the temperature down.

Little did the old man know how much God liked to talk to His children, how He longed to listen to them.

He was standing in the middle of the room, an arrogant look on his face. "What a night," Wendy sighed. Without even turning his head to look at her Raphael said, "Sleep." Wendy fell backward, her head landing on the pillow. "Don't do that to her!" Susan exclaimed. "You'd prefer to have this conversation with her listening?" Raphael asked, lifting one eyebrow.

keep the conversation about identity going. This is the work of psychotherapy: to learn both to assume

ask your friends what they like.

said, "before you have your wicked way with me. I'm Tommy Godwin, by the way." "So I'd gathered," retorted Gemma, escaping gratefully to the loo. Once safely behind the closed

A particularly cruel irony inherent in the targeting of Israeli academics, artists, and intellectuals is that a disproportionate number of them publicly oppose many of Israel's settlement policies. Instead of encouraging their efforts, BDS lumps them in with the very people and policies that they oppose. All this does is bar Israeli advocates for change from participating in the larger conversation with like-minded Palestinian individuals, and instead empower extremists on both sides.

You keep your past by having sisters. As you get older, they're the only ones who don't get bored if you talk about your memories.

refuse to be a slanderer. I will use Philippians 4:8 as my conversation sifter. Therefore, whatever things are true, noble, just, pure, lovely, and of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy about someone, I comment only on these things.

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

Another way to think about metamessages is that they frame a conversation, much as a picture frame provides a context for the images in the picture. Metamessages let you know how to interpret what someone is saying by identifying the activity that is going on: Is this an argument or a chat? Is it helping, advising, or scolding? At the same time, they let you know what position the speaker is assuming in the activity, and what position you are being assigned.

Throughout everything, my father's cheerfulness, his optimism, is palpable in his ever-present sense of humor. Yet I'm struck by a comment he makes in a conversation with Ryan: "If there is no humor, you find sadness. Sadness appears. No humor isn't followed by nothing. It's followed by sadness." I see in his journals and written memories that my father's perennial good humor and quick wit may be a cover for his sadness, which reminds me of my own.

These are the signals that combine with what is said to make up the devices we use to show we're listening, interested, sympathetic, or teasing—and that we're the right sort of people.

Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience— both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others. This is especially true in the family— and our history of family talk is like a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted.

Thus conversational signals can get crossed when well-intentioned speakers have different habits and expectations about using pacing and pausing, loudness, and pitch to show their intentions through talk—

A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity--a ratification of one's way of being human and one's way in the world.

One man commented that he and I seemed to have different definitions of gossip. He said, 'To you it seems to be discussion of personal details about people known to the conversationalists. To me, it's a discussion of the weaknesses, character flaws, and failures of third persons, so that the participants in the conversation can feel superior to them. This seems unworthy, hence gossip is bad.

The belief that sitting down and talking will ensure mutual understanding and solve problems is based on the assumption that we can say what we mean, and that what we say will be understood as we mean it. This is unlikely to happen if conversational styles differ.

Communication is a system. Everything that is said is simultaneously an instigation and a reaction, a reaction and an instigation. Most of us tend to focus on the first part of that process while ignoring or downplaying the second. We see ourselves as reacting to what others say and do, without realizing that their actions or words are in part reactions to ours, and that our reactions to them won't be the end of the process but rather will trigger more reactions, in a continuous stream.

Yet another man commented that women seem to wallow in their problems, wanting to talk about them forever, whereas he and other men want to get them out and be done with them.

For girls, talk is the glue that holds relationships together. Boys' relationships are held together primarily by activities: doing things together, or talking about activities such as sports or, later, politics.

I am often tongue-tied with strangers and have what the philosopher Monsieur Diderot calls l'esprit de l'escalier, staircase wit: only long after a remark is made to me will my imagination supply the thing I should have said in reply.