communication Quotes

“Eileen had long white hands. One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory.”

“JUROR #8: There were eleven votes for guilty. It’s not easy to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.”

“How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were where they said Bury me in the old churchyard! A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music. The bell! The bell! Farewell! O farewell!”

“The woman’s last speech had contained symbols new to him and those which were not new had been arranged in fashions not easily understood. But he was happy that the flavor had been suitable for communication between water brothers—although touched with something disturbing and terrifyingly pleasant.”

“Oh sure, they say they’re busy. They say that they didn’t have even a moment in their insanely busy day to pick up the phone.”

″‘Yes, Jubal. You—’ Smith stopped, looked embarrassed. ‘I again have not words. I will read and read and read, until I find words. Then I will teach my brother.‘”

“It was not possible to separate in the Martian tongue the human concepts: ‘religion,’ ‘philosophy,’ and ‘science’—and, since Mike thought in Martian, it was not possible for him to tell them apart.”

“You need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok.‘”

“You taught me language, and my profit on ’t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! ”

“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.”

“The whole of Hellas used once to carry arms, their habitations being unprotected and their communication with each other unsafe; indeed, to wear arms was as much a part of everyday life with them as with the barbarians.”

“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.”

“If men are to remain civilized, or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.”

“Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything”

“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”

“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”

“It is easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.”

“He says a million things without saying a word. I make a note to study David Petrakis. I have never heard a more eloquent silence.”

″ One man ... had contrived to telegraph to Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the world.”

“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”

“We often sit together at my kitchen table. The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us—we couldn’t use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.”

“It took me a moment. And then I realized the difference. He was speaking to me in Yiddish.”

“The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.”

“So much depends on the tone of voice.”

Language is man’s way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.

“I’ve decided language isn’t as advanced as we think it is. We’re still apes trying to express our thoughts with grunts while most of what we want to communicate stays locked in our brains.”

“In the track of fear we have so many conditions, expectations, and obligations that we create a lot of rules just to protect ourselves against emotional pain, when the truth is that there shouldn’t be any rules. These rules affect the quality of the channels of communication between us, because when we are afraid, we lie.”

“Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication –” he muttered.”

“She wrote to my father in Israel almost every day on expensive French stationary, and when she ran out of that she wrote to him on graph paper torn out of a notebook.”

The use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts.

“I think the preacher thinks about my mama all the time, too. He’s still in love with her...But he doesn’t tell me that. He won’t talk to me about her at all.”

“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. ”

“Some things you just can’t explain. You don’t even try. You don’t know where to start. All your sentences would jumble up like a giant knot if you opened your mouth. Any words you used would come out wrong.”

“Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed.”

“It takes careful observation, and education, and reflection, and communication with others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs.”

“I watch thee from the quiet shore; Thy spirit up to mine can reach; But in dear words of human speech We two communicate no more.”

“I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”

Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama.

″‘I’ll get bigger and bigger and bigger till I turn into a human.’ ‘Actually, you’re a human already,’ says Ma. ‘Human’s what we both are.’ I thought the word for us was real.”

“How can there be two Pauls? ‘You’d call him Uncle Paul.’ That’s too many names, my head’s full. My tummy’s still empty like the apple isn’t there. ‘What’s for lunch?‘”

“Some [crayons] are spelled wrong on purpose for a joke, like Mauvelous, that’s not very funny I don’t think.”

“But I think when a person gets older she should be able to discuss her problems and thoughts with other people, instead of just with another part of herself as you have been to me.”

“Near the start [of the note], there’s two words I never saw before, Ma says they’re her names like TV persons have, what everybody in Outside used to call her, it’s only me who says Ma.”

“I’m celebrating because I’ve got a friend who tells me all the things that ought to be told me.”

“He lived in friendship beside Vasudeva, and sometimes they would exchange words with each other, few and well-considered words. Vasudeva was no friend of words, Siddhartha seldom succeeded in inducing him to speak.”

“Even in him, even in your great teacher, I prefer the thing to the words, his actions and his life are more important than his speech, the gestures of his hand more important than his opinions.”

“That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.”

“If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning . . . But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it.”

“My problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity. You look at your paper brochure, and that’s where it ends. It ends with you.

“All symbols were in Smith’s vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly.”

“Tatiana’s English wasn’t very good, and often I couldn’t understand her letters. But I waited for them eagerly.”

“Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”

“How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.”

So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.

If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don’t tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate.

“So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, “Jug Jug” to dirty ears.”

″(Christophine) is intelligent in her way and can express herself well, but I did not like the look of her at all, and consider her a most dangerous person. My wife insisted that she had gone back to Martinique her native island, and was very upset that I had mentioned the matter even in such a roundabout fashion.”

“When you speak, always remember that God is one of your listeners.”

″‘What you do with her money, eh?’ Her voice was still quiet but with a hiss in it when she said ‘money.’ I thought, of course, that is what all the rigamarole is about. I no longer felt dazed, tired, half-hypnotized, but alert and wary, ready to defend myself.”

“It was their talk about Christophine that changed Coulibri, not the repairs or the new furniture or the strange faces. Their talk about Christophine and obeah changed it.”

“Say nothing and it may not be true.”

“Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.”

“If it works around linder, and mountain folk have linder inside us...maybe linder shapes quarry-speech in the way that cupping your hands around your mouth makes your voice louder. Or maybe quarry-speech travels through linder like sound through air, and the more linder the louder it is. Our memories move through linder, whether in the mountain or in a person.”

“In short, comics lacks the precision it ought to have for ordinary communication let alone serious philosophical deliberations.”

“The vast majority of human communication – whether in the form of emails, phone calls or newspaper columns – is gossip. It comes so naturally to us that it seems as if our language evolved for this very purpose.”

“In order for this family to function, we need to communicate.”

″‘I know you,’ he said, without looking round – ‘and I want nothing to say to you.‘”

“Her English, like my German, was nearly all holes. Yet invariably I spoke her language and she mine, although any other arrangement at all might have made for a less perforated means of communication.”

“Somehow, of late, I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word ‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?”

“I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume; but in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, ‘I would prefer not to.‘”

“Honest but gentle communication from the beginning is key.”

“I see now that I was in pain and wanted others to feel it, too. This was my way of communicating.”

“Ants occupy the same landscape that we do. They have plenty to do, things to occupy themselves. On some level they’re very well aware of their environment. But we don’t try to communicate with them. So I don’t think they have the foggiest notion that we exist.”

“What worries me the most,′ she continued, ‘is the opposite, the possibility that they’re not trying. They could communicate with us, all right, but they’re not doing it because they don’t see any point to it. It’s like...”--she glanced down at the edge of the tablecloth they had spread over the grass--“like the ants.”

“Ants occupy the same landscape that we do. They have plenty to do, things to occupy themselves. On some level they’re very well aware of their environment. But we don’t try to communicate with them. So I don’t think they have the foggiest notion that we exist.”

“I wouldn’t let her talk to me, but as I talked I would want her to reach out a soft white hand and stroke my head and say, “Poor think! Oh, you poor, poor thing!”

“Now, Daisy, I want us to work out a signal system of communication. When I elbow you real hard in the face, that means: shut up.”

“She touched the necklace, giving the word for it, and I gave mine. We pointed out other things – the spring, the cave, a gull flying, the sun and the sky, Rontu asleep – trading the names for them and laughing because they were so different. We sat there on the rock until the sun was in the west and played this game. Then Tutok rose and made a gesture of farewell.”

″‘...animals don’t always speak with their mouths,’ said the parrot in a high voice, raising her eyebrows. ‘They talk with their ears, with their feet, with their tails- with everything.‘”

“How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.”

“Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understanding each other through multiple layers of translators.”

“They walked as old friends walk, without often speaking, sharing the kind of silence that is not so much silence as a kind of still communication. Their footsteps rang out on the bare wet road, making the only sound anywhere in the village except the song of a blackbird and, somewhere further off, the sound of someone shoveling.”

“The caravans bark but the dogs more on.”

“Dogs can never speak the language of humans, and humans can never speak the language of dogs. But many dogs can understand almost every word humans say, while humans seldom learn to recognize more than half a dozen barks, if that.”

“So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is compromised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.”

The wolf then tells his story to the boy, through images in his pupil, and their communication slowly melts Blue Wolf’s mistrust of humans.

“The boy mysteriously appears at the wolf’s cage. “He stands there silently, without moving a muscle. Only his eyes shift.”

“The pupil blazes like fire as it fills the eye. But no matter how fat it gets, the boy never looked away. When everything has become pitch black, he discover what nobody has ever seen in the wolf’s eye before: the pupil is alive. There, staring and growling at the boy, is a black she-wolf snuggled up with her cubs. ”

“Wednesdays were always hectic on the Isle of Struay, for that was the day that the boat brought mail and provisions from the mainland.”

“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”

“Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared”

“Verbal compliments, or words of appreciation, are powerful communicators of love.”

“Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”

“Low trust causes friction, whether it is caused by unethical behavior or by ethical but incompetent behavior (because even good intentions can never take the place of bad judgment). Low trust is the greatest cost in life and in organizations, including families. Low trust creates hidden agendas, politics, interpersonal conflict, interdepartmental rivalries, win-lose thinking, defensive and protective communication—all of which reduce the speed of trust. Low trust slows everything—every decision, every communication, and every relationship.”

“A communications expert once made this distinction: “A know-it-all who doesn’t know what he is talking about is a jerk. A know-it-all who does know what he is talking about is just an ass.”

“Though we lived side by side throughout the South, communication between the two races had simply ceased to exist. Neither really knew what went on with those of the other race.”

“If we can just rise to the challenge of communication—here in the parlor of your mind—we can maybe reach across time and space and every ordinary thing to see so deep into the heart of each other that you might agree that I am like you.”

“Prayer is of no use when it is not used. Prayer is not only a matter of belief, it is a matter of practice. We can’t get caught in the trap of dogma or method. Prayer is not about right or wrong or “should” or “only.” It is about a personal or individualized way to talk with God or our Higher Power or Universal Energy or the collective unconscious or whatever we want to call it. Prayer is not about someone else telling us how to pray or what to say. It is about communication.”