Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.

Viewing movies in very slow motion, looking for synchrony, one realizes that what we know as dance is really a slowed-down, stylized version of what human beings do whenever they interact.

We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated.

We are only peripherally tied to the lives of others. It takes a long long time for us to become deeply involved with others, and for some this never happens.

People are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time. Time is... a primary organizer of all activities, a synthesizer and integrator, a way of handling priorities and categorizing experience, a feedback mechanism for how things are going, a measuring rod against which competence, effort, and achievement are judged as well as a special message system revealing how people really feel about each other and whether or not they can get along.

Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't.

The essence of cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing responses than with sending messages. It is more important to release the right response than to send the right message.