Conversation Quotes - Page 3

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know. I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out.

Sarah Orne Jewett

It is distressing how often we repeat ourselves. When we ask questions, we know the answers already. We've grown accustomed to horizontal communication, flatlining banalities and droning insignificance.

Louisa Hall

A conversation between Adso and William -You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.""And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know why you act, but you don't know know why you know that you know what you do?"I must say with pride that William gave me a look of admiration. "Perhaps that's it. In any case, this tells you why I feel so uncertain of my truth, even if I believe in it.

Umberto Eco

Can I get your cell phone number so we can text like normal antisocial human beings, since we are both too fucked up to have a conversation?

J.P. Barnaby

Durkon: You're only saying that because you don't want the world t

Rich Burlew

Betsy liked to talk. Her father always said she got it from her mother, and her mother always said she got it from her father. But whomever she got it from she was certainly a talker.

Maud Hart Lovelace

She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency her thoughts, and stopped abruptly.

Kate Chopin

It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the appropriate point in a conversation to say goodbye

Haruki Murakami

Can I get a lock for my tent?Bears can't unzip tents, Lana.Well, chainsaw psychos who wander the woods looking for young girls all alone to chop up into pieces can.There are no chainsaw psychos! I can't believe you've never been camping. It's safe, Lana. I promise.Easy for you to say. You'll be snuggled up safely in the arms of Beau Vincent. I'm more than positive he could take on a black bear.

Abbi Glines

Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool, trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don't know, and it's not very important. What matters is that she doesn't interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own "It's absolutely the same with me, I..."The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina's popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: "It's absolutely the same with me, I...

Milan Kundera

I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell herself a joke and clap her hands together as she let out a laugh; she would murmur to the plants as she watered them, and offer encouragement to the food as she cooked it. Sometimes I would walk into a room and surprise her as she was regaling herself with some delightful story, and I remember how the sound would dry up in her mouth. She stood there, frozen in the headlights of my teenage scorn.

Dan Chaon

If they’re together long enough, every couple has one conversation over and over. This was ours.

Frederick Weisel

Words were few and failing between them as though the silence that sat with them had laid its old lips on theirs and sucked them dry of speech. For where could one begin? With the weather? But here there was no weather. These few sad rooms were the old man's world. His horizons were all walls.

Michael Bedard

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later the would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The world euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. The the conversation proceeded more smoothly.

Roberto Bolaño

Conversation is the Best Content.

Ted Rubin

In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments

John Green

I love talking the way Trappists love silence.

Marty Rubin

I love to talk to people who love to talk. The warmth, the energy, the humanity.

Marty Rubin

Talking to people is the most educational thing I know.

Marty Rubin

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.

Shirley Jackson

God does not require from you empty words or idle conversations

Sunday Adelaja

Talking to Rhett was comparable only to one thing, the feeling of ease and comfort afforded by a pair of old slippers after dancing in a pair too tight.

Margaret Mitchell

As the Athenians to the Pnyx, the antique Romans to the Campus Martius, or our Nordic ancestors to the All-Thing, so the folk of Tilling flocked to the High Street for extempore parliament.

Tom Holt

Perfect the art of the pause for this is when the Holy Spirit speaks. Pausing creates white space in a conversation that enables the Holy Spirit to sort out our thoughts before we let out our words of life or death.

John M Sheehan

Everyone had something disparaging to say about the unfortunate Maltyshcheva, and the conversation began crackling merrily like a kindling bonfire.

Leo Tolstoy

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Clearly she was expected to say something, but panic at having to speak stole the thoughts from her head.

Shannon Hale

Just so you know, I’m goin’ to enlist.”“I’m proud of you. But why?”I groan against the pain but manage to give him a half smile. “I want to make sure Kiara’s got a boyfriend who has more to offer than a hot bod and a face that could make angels weep.

Simone Elkeles

That’s not the only reason I’m stayin’, chica. I can’t leave you any more than I could walkout that door right now while my leg is busted up. I was just thinkin’ . . . should we tell yourparents now or later?”“Tell them what?” I ask, eyes wide.He kisses me softly, then says proudly, “That we’re in a serious, monogamous, committedrelationship.”“We are?”“Sí. And when I get out of here, I’m gonna fix the door to your car.

Simone Elkeles

Are you mad?" I ask."I was." He glances at the ceiling then back at me. "Or confused, anyway. The whole thing threw me through for a loop. I thought I'd finally met a guy at Underwood I could relate to, and it turns out he wasn't a guy at all."I swallow. "I can see how that would be weird." "In a way though, I was relieved.""Relieved?" I echo. "Why?"He looks around embarrased. "Let's just say you had me questioning my sexual orientation.

Jody Gehrman

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

Truman Capote

A good conversation always involves a certain amount of complaining. I like to bond over mutual hatreds and petty grievances.

Lisa Kleypas

Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say.

Cees Nooteboom

It’s no company at all, when people know nothing and say nothing,’ she muttered.

Emily Brontë

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

Mark Twain

Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her presence. As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws. That’s what Kitty did. She kept lobbing the ball straight into the pocket of my glove, and when I threw the ball back to her, she hauled in everything that was even remotely in her area: jumping up to spear balls that soared above her head, diving nimbly to her left or right, charging in to make tumbling, shoestring catches. More than that, her skill was such that she always made me feel that I had made those bad throws on purpose, as if my only object had been to make the game more amusing. She made me seem better than I was, and that strengthened my confidence, which in turn helped to make my throws less difficult for her to handle. In other words, I started talking to her rather than to myself, and the pleasure of it was greater than anything I had experienced in a long time.

Paul Auster

It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.

Aimee Bender

He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.

Ian McEwan

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

Evelyn Waugh

Manners are the ability to put someone else at their ease...by turning any answer into another question.

Tina Brown

He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.

Leo Tolstoy

The conversation did not go very well and I began telling him about the people with their trays in the great cafeteria and suggesting that it would have done us more good to go there to be put in mind of our own mortality.

Barbara Pym

I don't know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You'd be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused.

Jodi Picoult

They should.""Should be like a wood bee," she said.It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut-in twins, each other's best and, most often, only audience.

Stewart O'Nan

...insisting that you control the topic of behavioral conversation ensures accountability by students...

Doug Lemov

High school parties exhausted me because I always felt like I was the only thinking person in a room mostly full of morons obliterating precious IQ points with every gulp of whatever booze they managed to steal out of their parents' liquor cabinets. College parties are exhausting in a diametrically opposite way. They are full of smart, funny people who are all used to being the smartest, funniest person in the room, so they spend the whole party talking over one another, overlapping and overtaking the conversation to prove that they are the smartest, funniest person in the room, if not the entire planet.

Megan McCafferty

The conversation limped along this line of thought much like a zombie: lifeless and mindless and making a jelly of whatever healthy brains were within its reach.

Steve Hockensmith

The head of Goldwater's California operation "what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: "Taken your vacation yet?" he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.

Rick Perlstein

Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?

Stella Gibbons

He could see that drinking and conversation were inexorably intertwined and that one did not occur without the other.

Kenneth Eade

The natural flow of discourse must be calm and serene; if wit, whim, fun and fire are present, they will not fail to flash brightly along its surface; but they can never constitute the main body of the stream itself.

Arthur Martine

How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?

Alexander McCall Smith

It comes down to this: If you want to be seen, heard and understood in the most genuine way possible, be open to the possiblity of vulnerability. Allow yourself to be open. I know it’s a scary place, a place very few people dare to venture, but just try it. Try moving the masks away and really looking at a person the next time they engaged in conversation with you.

Leigh Hershkovich

Give me a half hour's conversation. I will know more than I will reading 20 magazines.

Joseph Kennedy

The art of conversation lies in listening.

Malcom Forbes

Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.

Emily Post

R.E.A.L. conversation: Recognize judgments. Express thoughts neutrally. Ask questions. Listen for verbal & non-verbal messages.

John Stoker

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Pat Conroy

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.

Rose Macaulay

You know you're about as forthcoming as a mime.

Shirley Jump

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Conversation Quotes - Page 3

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