Best 825 quotes in «conversation quotes» category

That which is worth telling is not worth having.

The author relates George Bernard Shaw's sentiments that polite conversation excludes the only two subjects that matter, religion and politics.

The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,' continued Marvin. Again the pause. ' Oh d—' 'And that was with a coffee machine.' He waited.

The best listeners I know pause over words. ‘That’s an interesting way of putting it,’ they muse, or they ask. ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’ The consciousness that every word is a choice, that each word has its own resonance, nuance, emotional coloring, and weight informs their sense of what is being communicated. This kind of listening comes close to what we engage in when we listen to music...A good listener loves words, respects them, pays attention to them, and recognizes vague approximations as a kind of falsehood.

The boring thing with taking a walk with someone is that your thoughts are then dictated by the subject or subjects of your conversation; and that is made worse by the fact that most sane people are terrified of silence whenever they are with or near someone.

The cane is just not going to cut it. I shared with some of my colleagues that these brothers live in neighborhoods where they are getting whapped with a piece of stick all night, stabbed with knives, and pegged with screwdrivers that have been sharpened down, and they are leaking blood. When you come to a fella without even interviewing him, without sitting him down to find out why you did what you did, your only interest is caning him, because you are burned out and frustrated yourself. You say to him, ‘Bend over, you are getting six.’ And the boy grits his teeth, skin up his face, takes those six cuts, and he is gone. But have you really been effective? Caning him is no big deal, because he’s probably ducking bullets at night. He has a lot more things on his mind than that. On the other hand, we can further send our delinquent students into damnation by telling them they are no body and all we want to do is punish, punish, punish. Here at R.M. Bailey, we have been trying a lot of different things. But at the end of the day, nothing that we do is better than the voice itself. Nothing is better than talking to the child, listening, developing trust, developing a friendship. Feel free to come to me anytime if something is bothering you, because I was your age once before. Charles chuck Mackey, former vice principal and coach of the R. M. Bailey Pacers school.

The cheapest route to a new opportunity is conversation.

The contradictions of judgments, then, neither offend nor alter, they only rouse and exercise me. We evade correction, whereas we ought to offer and present ourselves to it, especially when it appears in the form of conference, and not of authority.

The conversation burned off like fog in sunlight.

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.

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.

The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams—mad but interesting.

The Conversation can go around everyone... everything.... every type of topic.

The crack that was Yark's mouth elongated, not a smile so much as a forcing apart of seams that went with the blunt question. To force Quoyle's seams apart. And other forced seams implicit.

The day drags along, you make thousands of plans, you imagine every possible conversation, you promise to change your behavior in certain ways–and you feel more and more anxious until your loved one arrives. But by then, you don't know what to say. The hours of waiting have been transformed into tension, the tension has become fear, and the fear makes you embarrassed about showing affection.

The difference between hearing and listening is significant...Listening well means knowing when to interject questions, when to redirect the conversation, and, more importantly, in what terms to interpret the other's narrative. It means recognizing that the speaker is making purposeful choices, consciously or unconsciously, and considering what those purposes might be. It means accepting the tension between making judgments and withholding judgment as the other's story or line of reasoning unfolds. It means hearing and noting the omissions. And it means listening not only through the words spoken, but to them.

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.

The difference between educated people and uneducated people is that educated people have been opened up to the notion that you can disagree without fighting; whereas uneducated people, in conversation, seek to always agree--everybody agrees and agrees and that's considered basic social libation.

The more you read, the less you sound foolish when you speak.

The low lintels of the cottage have many disadvantages, but they have one supreme advantage. They afford an immediate topic of conversation. They make things start, quite literally, with a bang.

The host took care to produce one or another of these whenever the current subjects seemed about used up, so that the conversation gathered new life and at the same time steered clear of political arguments, which are hindersome to both ingestion and digestion.

The one who would understand me is equally shy to start a conversation.

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.

The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect. That’s actually a faster way to engage with what they’re getting at than to lob grenades in their direction… If you’re going to hold someone to what they believe, make sure you accurately represent what they believe.

The people who ask questions decide the quality of their conversation.

The only way to free yourself from all the anxiety you’re feeling about the difficult conversation you know you need to have is by having the difficult conversation. It’s time. It’s been time. You’ll survive it. Just be brave and start talking.

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.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

There is a difference between 'talking' and 'having a conversation'. When you talk you pass time but when you have a conversation, you create memories.

There comes a point in some conversations where I simply quit and let reality do my talking for me.

There was nothing Mandy had wanted more than to give her full attention to the world of Personifications and ignore those who ignored her in society. She’d wanted to talk out loud to Alecto, to have conversations in front of other ordinary people. Unfortunately, to do that in front of ordinary people would only prove her insanity, and although Mandy was naïve at times, she wasn’t stupid.

There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.

The trouble is that many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either teaching or being taught. They think that everything is just a matter of opinion. I have mine, and you have yours; and our right to our opinions is as inviolable as our right to private property. On such a view, communication cannot be profitable if the profit to be gained is an increase in knowledge. Conversation is hardly better than a ping-pong game of opposed opinions, a game in which no one keeps score, no one wins, and everyone is satisfied because he does not lose - that is, he ends up holding the same opinions he started with.

The second I realized I had nothing left to say is the exact moment I realized it was truly over.

The silences in conversation honor and support the words they carry, as water supports the vessels that float on it. Only in silence can the "listening into" take place - the pausing over words, meanings, implications, associations - and the waiting - for the Spirit to speak, for the right response to a surface. At its deepest level, good conversation holds a balance we seek in prayer between speaking and listening, waiting for the unplanned, epiphanic moment that comes unbidden in the midst of what we thought we were pursuing. Those silences also distinguish substantive conversation from idle chatter that fills all the "air time" available, often as a protection against the silences in which a new thought might take us where we're not sure we want to go. When silences are allowed, conversation can rise to the level of sacred encounter.

The true mark of English conversation is not being able to tell when you've been insulted. I think the more sophisticated society becomes, the more it hides behind the masks it manufactures.

The tone of the repartee was familiar, as was the subject matter, a strangely comfortable background music to most of my waking hours over the last two decades or so - and I realised that, my God... I've been listening to the same conversation for twenty-five years!

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

The world is full of unrequited love,' I said finally. 'You and Patrick having problems?' Dad said, reaching around to get the butter out of the fridge. 'No, I was just wondering what you would say if I was a lesbian.' 'Come again?' said Lester. 'I'm having a hard time following this conversation.

This isn't a conversation. This is the sort of monologue you run in your head with lovers you'll never speak to again. This is what happens when thoughts curdle.

They do not learn, fixed in their ways as they are. You are naïve to think otherwise. It’s an illness, Assassin, for which there is but one cure.’ ‘You’re wrong. And that’s why you must be put to rest.’ ‘Am I not unlike those precious books you seek to save? A source of knowledge with which you disagree? Yet you’re rather quick to steal my life.’ ‘A small sacrifice to save many. It is necessary.

They were opposites in one way They were similar in another But they felt real with each other They felt alive with each other They understood their silences even when one would forget the other and be busy with work and struggles of life And when they finally spoke to each other, their conversation sparked a fire in the atmosphere!

Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.

They said words they did not mean, and their conversations seemed to follow all kinds of rules—rules that no one has ever explained to Oscar.

They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.

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.

Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that.

truly this is one of the few advantages of being a star - or rather a former star, in my case: when you meet someone else and you arrive, as you might normally expect, at a point where you're both bored, even though neither of the two is precisely the cause of it, in some way by common agreement, it's always the other who bears the responsibility for it, who feels guilty for not having kept the conversation at a sufficiently high level, for not having known how to establish a sufficiently warm and sparkling atmosphere. This situation is comforting, and even relaxing as soon as one truly begins not to give a fuck.

Throw an idea into the world and its impact will ripple and reverberate beyond your side of the shore.

Tis my humor as much to regard the form as the substance, and the advocate as much as the cause, as Alcibiades ordered we should: and every day pass away my time in reading authors without any consideration of their learning; their manner is what I look after, not their subject. And just so do I hunt after the conversation of any eminent wit, not that he may teach me, but that I may know him, and that knowing him, if I think him worthy of imitation, I may imitate him.