Quotes about Conversation

Ask yourself: at which level can I give love?

1. Love the oneness in those people with whom you can truly be yourself, can find comfort in their thoughts, can feel supported in your own discoveries, and can feel loved unconditionally.

2. Love the shared friendship in those who are eager to be with you and learn from you.

3. Love from a distance those people who enjoy conversation only at the social level, and discourage what you would consider more meaningful conversation.

4. Love the God fiber in those people who make it difficult or impossible for you to be with them, care about them, or honor their path.

Everything is conversation.

If the Jokers are the only ones who know the art of holding a proper conversation, then this game of Solitaire would be solved much more quickly if everyone were a Joker.

A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.

This is why I love art. Art is the medium. those of us who see the unexplainable converse in.  It's safe. And those who don't see the neon dots floating around people, the sparkles falling from the sky, and the auras, of course, can just write it off as imagination and creativity. In that respect, it's a coded conversation.

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they Always purr.  'If them would only purr for "yes" and mew for "no," or any rule of that sort,' she had said, 'so that one could keep up a conversation!  But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?'

'Speak when you're spoken to!' The Queen sharply interrupted her.
'But if everybody obeyed that rule,' said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, 'and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, so that -- '
'Ridiculous!' cried the Queen.  'Why, don't you see, child -- ' here she broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of the conversation. 

'O Tiger-lily,' said Alice... 'I wish you could talk!'
'We can talk,' said the Tiger-lily:  'when there's anybody worth talking to."

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax -
Of cabbages - and kings - "

What if a man cannot be made to say anything?

How do you learn his hidden nature?

I sit in front of him in silence,
and set up a ladder made of patience,
and if in his presence a language from beyond joy
and beyond grief begins to pour from MY chest,
I know that his soul is as deep and bright
as the star Canopus rising over Yemen.
And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm
of words sweeping down, I know HIM from what I say,
and how I say it, because there is a window open
between us, mixing the night air of our beings.

Every spoken word is a covering for the inner self...   Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong, the listener hears the source.

Many things must be left unsaid, because it's late,
but whatever conversation we haven't had tonight,
we'll have tomorrow.

Education begins a gentleman, conversation completes him.

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

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.