Conversation Quotes - Page 5

Speaking up is important. Yet to speak up without listening is like banging pots and pans together: Even if it gets you attention, it’s not going to get you respect.

Gina Barreca

The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.

William Hazlitt

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

Julian Barnes

Heaven, envious of our joys, is waxen pale; And when we whisper, then the stars fall down To be partakers of our honey talk.(Dido, Queen of Carthage 4.4.52-54)

Christopher Marlowe

Madam: Are you lucky, Debora?Debora: What do you mean?Madam: Well, you don't look that happy today...Debora: Is it that clear?

Debora van der Velde

Awareness is about improving social intelligence. If you can’t see, hear, or feel the dynamics of a conversation, you can’t manage them.

John Stoker

I mean …” Dennis was saying, looking pointedly at Mave, but Mave was watching the waitress approach. Oh, life, oh, sweet, forgiven for the ice … He grabbed Mave’s wrist. There was always an emergency. And then there was love. And then there was another emergency. That was the sandwiching of it. Emergency. Love. Emergency. “I mean, it’s not as if you’ve been dozing off,” Dennis was saying, his voice reaching her now, high and watery. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve been having this conversation alone.” He tightened his grip. “I mean, have I?

Lorrie Moore

In fact, the more each person can remove his or her ego from the discussion and focus on the subject matter, the more fruitful the conversation will be for all involved.

Matthew Kelly

I had a dream about you last night... it was about a dreamer and a drifter walking into a bar. They start talking and swapping stories. No matter what the drifter says the dreamer always one-upped him. The drifter then woke up and realized he was the dreamer.

Marshall Ramsay

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.

David Halberstam

Frasier (Responding to the suggestion that he undertake the difficult work of closure in a relationship): "What you just said about my success made a lot of sense. I tuned you out after that.

Frasier Crane

Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

Rick Perlstein

Reading a book makes a conversation with the author (Robin Sharma on The Cure For Fear - Robin Sharma)

Deyth Banger

Finally! You're here!"Uh....Do I know you?"Well, no....But you're here, all the same...

Lynn Weingarten

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

Chuck Palahniuk

If a conversation is not working, then you need to make a different choice. Stop what you are doing & do something different.

John Stoker

Most people he knew, his wife included, wouldn't make it through an hour on the promise of four sentences. But Frankie Bard was like a camel. She could hold her words for days--as long as she could watch the goings-on.

Sarah Blake

Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent.

Dean Koontz

Like a good Indian, he knew when to talk and when to remain silent. Like a good Indian, he knew there was never a good time to talk.

Sherman Alexie

Silence is also a form of speaking.

Herta Müller

Mr Rycroft said nothing. It was so difficult not to say the wrong thing to Captain Wyatt that it was usually safer not to reply at all.

Agatha Christie

We fall back into silence. I look around XO Café and notice that chatter happens mostly at tables where the diners are young and hip. The older couples, the ones sporting wedding bands that wink with their silverware, eat without the pepper of conversation. Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?

Jodi Picoult

It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.

Sarah Orne Jewett

There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.

James Robertson

Dallas, is it remotely possible for you to carry on a conversation that's not loaded down with manure?

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Speaking with her always felt like sitting on a seashore. Hearing the waves and feeling them crashing into my feet, While gazing the setting sun and the way he colours the whole sky. I never got tired of it.

Akshay Vasu

As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?

Sam Harris

Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.

Michael Finkel

Our hearts bear a similarity with storerooms. We hold in them our trampled convictions, our fears, suppressed acts of valor, disappointments, enmity, anguish, secrets, things we wish we should have done, things we wish we shouldn’t have, regret.And continue piling them up with emotions, memories, conversations which did happen and conversations which didn’t, soured relationships and bitter people all of which we should have discarded, we keep it within until there is no space left, until the room is full, occupied after which we go on to lock it. Once in a while we happen to open the room and sight the dust accumulated all over, we relive each moment, each memory and each emotion again and soon fall upon the realization as to how deeply the room is in need of cleaning and so we clean it.We clean it so that we can fill it once more, hold it, bear it, relish it, heal from it and then finally let it go.

Chirag Tulsiani

Bodisham insisted upon a series of conferences with practically all the Group present and participating. The egg of the world revolution was indeed incubated in meetings very like tutorial classes. Our dramatic and romantic dispositions would have it otherwise, but that was the course reality chose to take. It was begotten of a sentence, it was fostered in talk. In the beginning was the Word. There is no strong, silent man in the history of the world renascence."I've got so little to say," said Dreed, and he was the nearest approach to speechlessness in the Group."All the more reason for coming to listen," said Rud.They had to understand each other, Bodisham urged, and to keep on understanding each other. "You have to talk a movement into being," he said, "and you have to keep it alert by talk. You have to write and keep on writing memoranda on the different expressions of our fundamental ideas, as fact challenges them. It is laborious but absolutelynecessary."So long as Lenin lived, Bodisham argued, he wrote and talked and explained, and when he died progress in Russia turned its face to the wall. The hope went out of the Russian experiment. "You have to play the role of Lenin in our movement," said Bodisham. The Common-sense Party had to keep alive mentally even if it risked serious internal conflicts. Rigidity was a sign of death. Fixed creeds were the coffins of belief.

H.G.Wells

My love and anger are in deep conversation these days, teaching and learning from one another. I'm doing my best to stay open to all of it.I’m curious to see what love does with all my anger.

Scott Stabile

There is nothing more entertaining then leaving someone speechless. Yet, there is nothing sadder than realizing that person was incapable of retaining half of what you said, and will repeat the story all wrong to someone else.

Shannon L. Alder

The topics which language limits us to aren’t much worth discussing in the first place.(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

Mort W. Lumsden

Most adults have a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, meaning that children must learn 10 to 20 words a day between the ages of eight months and 18 years. And yet the most frequent 100 words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4000 words account for 98% of conversation.

David Miller

I am beginning to worry that my speech is becoming a rather incomprehensible mixture of a Victorian woman, an Australian Beach Bum and a Laddish city boy

C.S. Woolley

Why should conversation always be so much more coherent than experience?

Amy Leach

We must understand that out of community and dialogue, the answers will arrive in their own time and way.

Bryant McGill

Get specific sooner and reap many rewards. The specific detail or example proves the general conclusion, not the reverse. The more specific you are abut anything the more clear you become, for yourself and in telling others. Thus you reduce the chance of others misunderstanding you. And you become more compelling, credible and memorable.

Kare Anderson

- If no one understands anything in the same way, what use is communication? - The best way to recycle empty soup cans is to tie a string to them and talk to yourself - from up to a mile away.

Stefan D

I am not knocking advances that provide a healthier life and alleviate suffering or unnecessary premature death. I am advocating inclusion of education on end-of-life matters and the promotion of understanding, conversation, and planning.

Lisa J. Shultz

They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.

Malcolm Cowley

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation.

Adam Smith

Good Morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat."What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?""All of them at once," said Bilbo. "And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain...."Good morning!" he said at last. "We don't want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water." By this he meant that the conversation was at an end."What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!" said Gandalf. "Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won't be good till I move off.

J.R.R. Tolkien

During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

Edward Carey

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

Charles Taylor

I want a future abortion conversation known for its openness, respect and empathy, so instead of generating more heat, anger and conflict, I practice pro-voice.

Aspen Baker

And then it hit me—I don’t have to participate in these toxic conversations. But if I choose to, I can set a different example. I can bring love to the moment,regardless of the response. I can choose to be kind, no matter what.My power lives in my love.

Scott Stabile

Imagine going to work every day to do only and exactly what you love!! All the work gets done because of the abundant diversity of your team. Different skills, interests and talents are woven together into a whole that is much greater than the sum of the parts!

Denise Moreland

Be a good listener. With rapt attention, let every communication or conversation you have with your mentor, friends or even strangers be well understood.

Israelmore Ayivor

In a useful conversation... there is a double coincidence of wants. You have to be interested in what I have to say; I have to be interested in what you have to say. This is an important reason why people with conventional interests seem more socially intelligent. Even if they don't check whether their audience cares, it probably does.

Bryan Caplan

If I don't see the reason of someone being my friend, chances are, we are just floating and I need a ship to set sail.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Sorrow spoken lends a little courage to the speaker.

Walter Wangerin Jr.

They say that animals are incapable of feelings and reasoning. This is false. No living thing on earth is void of either. They also say that man is the most intelligent — and the most superior — species on earth. This is also false. It is very arrogant to assume that we are the most intelligent species when we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It has been shown that both rats and monkeys learn from making errors, yet we have not. Our history proves this. All creatures on earth have the capacity to love and grieve the same way we do. No life on the planet is more deserving than another. Those who think so, are the true savages.

Suzy Kassem

And in the silence what followed, I reckon our eyes had some long conversation our mouths could’ve never talked through. Some long, looking talk about things gone and long since said. About cries out in the night and some long ago tangling of limbs. And about them betrayals done time and time again—by both of us—what led to me pointing the Green Man’s rifle at the man what once loved me under the Green Man’s stars.

J.D. Jordan

There are words which close a conversation as with an iron door.

Alexandre Dumas

I try to think of things to say but nothing comes, and if something did come I probably couldn't say it. This is my great obstacle, the biggest of all the boulders littering my path. In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, it all collapses.

Isaac Marion

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I appricated that Nell was talking to me like a grown-up, but I had no idea what she meant. Still, I could see that the words flowed together like water over a riverbed.

Silas House

Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.

Derek Landy

Everybody talks, but there is no conversation.

Dejan Stojanovic

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Conversation Quotes - Page 5

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