There is a person whose acquaintance and conversation I do earnestly recommend unto you as thing of the greatest advantage: you will be surprised when I tell you it is yourself.
I struggle in every lecture and conversation and correspondence to grasp exactly the most acute and incisive way of phrasing issues, but it was precisely to discourage students and readers from making false idols of my ways of phrasing things that I have sought always to recast issues in alternative ways of interpreting or terming them. Every attempt at wording issues has its idiomatic potential deformities, its wayward or stray implications and connotations. There is never just one absolutely right way of phrasing anything. Words are not perfectly equivalent to or univocal with principles or ideas or values. The liveliness or freedom of our minds is expressed in our agility at varying not just perspectives but also verbal constructions: we must always struggle to preserve distance between ourselves and our verbalizations as our intellectual and moral creatures.
We shook hands. Norm’s hand felt like salted mackerel. Our brief interaction had put him in a talkative mood. “There’s no business like shoe business,” he uttered with a death rattle laugh, heh heh, peering at me sideways like a depraved cherub as he droned on and on about the good old days in the shoe business, the bonus money and the belles whose stockinged ankles he fondled when he could still get a boner … but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman. Who was this character?
Leadership, for me, is just this. For some reason you are given the task of identifying capacities in others. In other words, when I’ve been put in leadership positions, it was not about me doing anything. It was about me looking around and saying, for example, “Oh, Joan. This is really for her. And this is really for him.” And then not just making it happen over their dead bodies, but recognizing, out of the circle of acquaintances that you have, that these are the right people therefore the task. Or, let’s say you have a kind of person in mind, but there is no such person in your circle. You recognize you need a certain kind of person and you know that person is out there somewhere. If you hold the image long enough, they will show up.
So you create the picture; you hold it, and over the course of a year or two, that person steps into your life, and you recognize him or her. You feel them out a little bit, the acquaintanceship builds up, and then you spring on them what you have in mind. If you’ve been a good judge, they light up. Because they know that much in their life has been a preparation for this conversation.
In my life there have been several individuals whose presence made it easier for me to think, pleasanter to make my responses.
For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go"...
The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
Good conversation, like a defensive driver, yields the right of way.
Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
. . . nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. "Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death."
Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.
The secret of success in conversation is to be able to disagree without being disagreeable.
Conversation, n.: A vocal competition in which the one who is catching his breath is called the listener.
I can't believe I'm having this conversation . . . With you! You've probably never read a book in your life that wasn't written by John Grisham. You don't get it. People like you are so content to write-off English. English just isn't about analysing stories - if it was, I wouldn't be like this. Stories, novels, whatever . . . reflect something about the writer . . . and the culture . . . and the society that it came from. It's a mirror - a mirror to ourselves. And when we do it right, when we just get it, we know something about ourselves. English is an understanding of the self. If we can see ourselves clearly, we know the right decision to make. And if you don't know who you are and make the wrong choices, what good is it if you can make two-hundred and fifty thousand?
To garden, you open your personal space to admit a few, a great many, or thousands of plants which exude charm, pleasure, beauty, oxygen, conversation, friendship, confidence, and other rewards should you succeed in meeting their basic needs. This is why people garden. It can be easy but challenging, and the rewards are priceless.
Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says, 'there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.' A well bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.
Associate with men of judgment, for judgment is found in conversation, and we make another man's judgment ours by frequenting his company.
His enemies might have said before that he talked rather too much; but now he has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful.
Macaulay is like a book in breeches. . . . He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
Remember that gardeners generally want to share knowledge and hear your comments, so don't be shy about starting a conversation. Like artists, most gardeners want to know how their creation communicates with the viewer. See if you can discover the spirit and vision behind the garden and reflect on what is moved within you.
The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The government may not, through the [Communications Decency Act], interrupt that conversation. . . . As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion. . . . The government, therefore, implicitly asks this court to limit both the amount of speech on the Internet and the availability of that speech. This argument is profoundly repugnant to First Amendment principles.
Ignorance has its virtues; without it there'd be mighty little conversation.
Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor.
When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.
Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.
Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.
The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.
I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.
