Quotes about conversation

However, it is well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next.

Know when to walk away, even when the conversation is going well. Putting pressure on your partner to continue a discussion beyond their comfort level shuts down listening, encourages defensiveness, and turns the conversation into a frustrated rehearsal of why one of you is correct and the other dense.

Seemingly impossible conversations typically have one thing in common: they're about moral beliefs rooted in one's sense of identity, but they play out on the level of facts (or assertions, name-calling, grandstanding, threats, etc.). [...] The most difficult conversations, then, masquerade as discussions about something other than morality, but they are actually about what qualities, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors individuals believe make them good people or bad people and why it is important to hold the right views among those.

Most basic elements of civil discussion, especially over matters of substantive disagreement, come down to a single theme: making the other person in a conversation a partner, not an adversary. To accomplish this, you need to understand what you want from the conversation, make charitable assumptions about others' intentions, listen, and seek back-and-forth interaction (as opposed to delivering a message).

She was sick of conversations with people passing through. Nothing you said to each other mattered a damn because you'd never see them again.

You cannot talk to people successfully if they think you are not interested in what they have to say or you have no respect for them.

He’d obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear.

I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon.

“It’s that vacant expression,” she said. “People just want to fill the empty void.”

'There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.'

In the whole dark universe, I've met you at this bit of fire, and we speak with each other, and listen to each other. All of life and the war led up to this present time of being here with you. (p209)

exchanging agreeable remarks for no other purpose than to keep silence from closing in.

she talked less, or at least did less of the kind of talking whose only purpose was to fill silence

Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?