Best 825 quotes in «conversation quotes» category

I may just be on the outskirts of being OK.

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?

I’m not crazy.” “Said every loony that ever lived.

I'm sorry." "Sorry? For what?" He straightened and moved a bit closer, sounding honestly puzzled. "I am not much of a conversationalist, I'm afraid. I am not used to - to any of this. You must find this terribly..." "Terribly what?" "Boring." She faced him squarely then, for she refused to shy away from difficulties. He let out a short bark of laughter. "Boring? My dear Miss Bainbridge, boring is definitely something you are not." "I don't know how you can say that," she retorted somewhat crossly. "There is really no need for you to be polite. I haven't said any of the things I should. I have been blunt and no doubt impolite. I have never danced before with any man I haven't known since I could toddle. And now I cannot even come up with the most commonplace remark." His chuckle was low and warm [...]. "Oh, you know what I mean." Really the man was maddening. "You shouldn't laugh at someone who is admitting their grievous social ineptitude." "What else should I do?" His teeth glinted in the darkness. "Let me assure you that I have danced with a great many girls whom I have not known since childhood. And I have heard a great many commonplace remarks. It is, quite frankly, a relief to enjoy the quiet and cool of the garden without hearing that the weather is quite nice this evening or that the breeze is most refreshing or that the party is so enjoyable.

I’m talking to the only one who’ll listen About the lonely nights and all that I’m missin Haven’t seen you lately but I heard your doin fine I’m In between two places Where my words didn’t come to you in time

In a broad and true sense, good conversation is life-giving: it inspires and invigorates...livelieness in our use of language, both oral and written, matters: how lively language is life-giving - how it may literally, physiologically, quicken our breath, evoke our laughter, raise our eyebrows, open our hearts, renew our energies. Lively language invents and evokes and sustains.

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.

In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

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

In many ways, the title American is an oxymoron because one may look it on the outside but not feel it on the inside.

In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.

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

In this era, be careful of your conversations because you are just 3 seconds away from a screenshot.

In the war zone of arguments, debates, criticism - silence is the safe house.

In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: "I wish you luck." I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me. And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.

...I only told you about it because I thought I might get a laugh out of you for once even if it wasn't the truth, Jessie. Things don't have to be true to talk about 'em, you know.

I often look to men to model behavior," she goes on after a pause. "Not because I want to squelch what’s feminine about me, but because sometimes I want a little more action, a little less feeling in my interactions. I’ve been doing this thing lately where I try to talk slower at meetings. I take a lot of meetings with women and we all talk really fast. But every guy talks so much slower. Maybe there’s a scientist who could tell me why, but I think men are just a little bit more comfortable taking up conversational real estate. So I’ve been seeing how slow I can tolerate talking. I’m doing it now. Let me tell you, it’s really hard for me.

Irritatingly angry people have no sense of humor when wearing their “angry pants.

[I retained] only the Habit of expressing my self in Terms of modest Diffidence, never using when I advance any thing that may possibly be disputed, the Words 'Certainly, 'undoubtedly', or any others that I give the Air of Positiveness to an Opinion; but rather say 'I conceive', or 'I apprehend a Thing to be so or so', 'It appears to me', or 'I should think it so or so for such & such Reasons', or 'I imagine' it to be so or so, or 'it is so' if I am not mistaken.—This Habit I believe has been of great Advantage to me, when I have had occasion to inculcate my Opinions and persuade Men into Measures that I have been from time to time engag'd in promoting.—And as the chief Ends of Conversation are to inform, or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well meaning sensible Men would not lessen their Power of doing Good by a Positive assuming Manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create Opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which Speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving Information or Pleasure: For if you would inform, a positive dogmatical Manner in advancing your Sentiments, may provoke Contradiction & prevent a candid Attention.

I see the pain of miserly love in young people,' I say. 'You don't have that kind of melancholy on your face. But I'm careful not to step on your feet when I speak with you. It's not like dancing. It's like a stone walkway with a little grass between the cracks. It's strong but I will try to tread carefully and not ruin it. In Muslim homes you leave your shoes outside. This is how I behave with you.

It has been said already, but bears repeating: no blanket statement can sum up an entire group of people. No book, no chapter, no study, no research report can attempt to do that either. Instead, Understanding Y attempts to start a conversation - one that we hope will delve a little deeper and dispel some commonly held assumptions about Generation Y, a conversation that we hope is the first of many.

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.

Is that the biggest favor your vocal cords have done to anyone this week?

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.

I think good conversation is really the best form of sex.

[I]t is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute.

It only needs a desire, not words; to start a conversation.

It is very painful to argue with an incredibly ignorant person. Not because they are stupid, but because the stupid are unbelievably arrogant and insulting. Their constant intention to manipulate a conversation in order to nullify their responsibility transforms any conversation into a game of theirs to bring another person down rather than using logic, and much less allow an agreement.

It's extraordinary, the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often - both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.

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.

It's far more important why is being said, than what.

It was like leading people to the edge of a cliff, showing them the view, and then shoving them off.

It was like that time on the phone, how I said I was scared you’d forget about me. The way you said that’s a chance you’ll have to take was said with such a deep repressed sadness.

It’s unfortunate really—how everyone can live on the same soil yet not even know the first thing about their neighbors.

It was our first date and I asked what his favorite movie is. He asked if I’d judge him, but instead of judging him I just loved him.

I usually found so-called "small talk" boring. I like "large talk", which is more about theories and concepts, mixed with facts and known quantities.

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

I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

Lycurgus, who ordered that a great piece of money should be but of an inconsiderable value, on the contrary would allow no discourse to be current which did not contain in few words a great deal of useful and curious sense.

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.

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

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.

Moreover, vulgar and casual opinions are something more than nothing in nature; and he who will not suffer himself to proceed so far, falls, peradventure, into the vice of obstinacy, to avoid that of superstition.

Most men would no longer enjoy conversing with most women if they stopped bringing their vaginas along.

Most of us are so used to living amidst the noise of modern life that we have forgotten the value of silence. Imagine that you switch off all the fans and ACs at your home. You can now hear the slightest sound of the horn from a vehicle plying on the road, or a conversation between people or the crying of a child in your neighbourhood. When it is night and the silence is deep, you can hear the ticking of your clock. When the silence is even deeper, you can even hear the vibrations of the universe and the beating of your own heart.

My best friend came to visit from far away. She took two planes and a train to get to Brooklyn. We met at a bar near my apartment and drank in a hurry as the babysitter's meter ticked. In the past, we'd talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world. We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people—the poets, the mystics, the explorers—were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.

My casual talk with my adult children brings with it another fleeting sadness: They are the age I was when it became, because of profound political differences, difficult for me to chat easily with my parents: vituperation always lurked. They and I later reconciled but those years of loss now add a special poignancy.

[M]rs. Miniver was beginning to feel more than a little weary of exchanging ideas (especially political ones) and of hearing other people exchange theirs. It's all very well, she reflected, when the ideas have had time to flower, or at least to bud, so that we can pick them judiciously, present them with a bow, and watch them unfold in the warmth of each other's understanding: but there is far too much nowadays of pulling up the wretched little things just to see how they are growing. Half the verbal sprigs we hand each other are nothing but up-ended rootlets, earthy and immature: left longer in the ground they might have come to something, but once they are exposed we seldom manage to replant them. It is largely the fault, no doubt, of the times we live in. Things happen too quickly, crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed. Each of us, to relieve his feels, broadcasts his own running commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation.

My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o'clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep.

My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.