Quotes About Conversation

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up.

Listen to understand rather than listen to respond.

Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect.

This dual sense of individual advancement and collective decline that I thought accounted for some of the most troubling attitudes I heard in some conversations.

Then, during the course of our conversation, he repeated the same story that my grandfather had told, about the white man who had tried to purchase my father's forgiveness

He was an erudite man and began our conversation with a history of slave religion, telling me about the Africans who, newly landed on hostile shoes, had sat circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most radical of ideas – survival, and freedom, and hope.

And in that moment, I had the strongest wish to sit beside him and talk. To ask him where he'd found the strength and imagination to do so much with so very little. To ask how he'd recovered from disappointment.

Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect. A year passes and you know you feel differently, but you're not sure what or why or how, so your mind casts back for something that might give that difference shape: a word, a glance, a touch.

AT DINNER ONE NIGHT, Malia asked me what I was going to do about tigers. "What do you mean, sweetie?" "Well, you know they're my favorite animal, right?

When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president…the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. President Obama, in conversation with Marilynne Robinson, in New York Review of Books

Take whatever question they give you, give 'em a quick line to make it seem like you answered it…and then talk about what you want to talk about.

you can't go around telling people, 'I'm on a mission to discover the purpose of life.' Not if you're hoping to prolong the conversation.

Very often in a classroom or a conversation I feel like yelling, 'What difference does it make?' Because 94% of my life is occupied with utter trivia. Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others.

Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not.

Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.

Even the bells from the churches have a conversation, all ringing at once.

You from out of town?" he asked after a while, eying my car. "No," I said. "I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate." I didn't like his looks.

Willa wondered how many tuition dollars they'd invested in this conversation, and whether she could get a refund; she wished they would all shut up and eat.

But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can't stop talking about them.

apron back on, and I washed all the dishes while she sat on her wooden stool and watched. I told her just sit, I've got this. Miss Betsy acted like she'd never seen a man clean up a kitchen before, which maybe she hadn't. I wanted to keep her talking about Angus, so I asked

To tell me it's supposed to stop raining, you came up here?" Lusa asked, looking from one sun-toughened face to the other for some clue. It was always like this, anytime she got wedged into a conversation with her brothers-in-law. This sense of having wandered into a country where they spoke English but all the words meant something different.

know how that sounds. But you get twenty people in a big circle talking and chugging, and the effect is pretty good.

He made a habit of prattling at the top of his lungs through Sunday dinners at our house. Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.