Quotes About Conversation

I was in a conversation and someone said: "You know, we were talking about the whole issue of transgender and how it has become so accepted now, and somebody said, 'You know the Oprah show, I think has had a big impact.'" I said, I don't think so. We did several transgender [shows], but we didn't do as much for transgender as I did for, say, abused kids or battered women. And they said, "But no, you started the conversation. You started the conversation and the conversation has led us to here."

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.

If the whole country had to have the same conversation that was safe for everybody, it would be a pretty awful place to live. There wouldn't be a conversation.

Before my commercial career, I never played for more than an audience of 99 seats somewhere in downtown New York, but occasionally someone would recognize me in the subway and say, "Oh, I saw you in that play, you were really great in that," or "the director was really something." It becomes a conversation. When people spot me on the street from my work in commercials, there's nowhere for the conversation to go. Obviously I'm an actor and I can't.

Our challenge is to not look away, but rather to transform the field; to create a new political conversation, our own conversation, out of which we can speak our truth in our own way.

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 circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.

I think, if you can only talk about your stuff in a jargonistic way, you're not as smart as you think. You're alienating people who deserve to have a conversation, or a place in the conversation. If you take the complete inverse and are staunchly anti-intellectual, then I think there's a certain amount of resentfulness in that. There's something about that standpoint that feels a little bit insecure.

There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.

I kiss her and she finds the light switch and turns it off, and we're just lit in Pepsi-can colors and it's like we've finally found this other kind of conversation, this conversation in gestures and pulls and pushes and breaths and grasps and teases and glimmers and rubs and expectation.

Not to converse with a man worthy of conversation is to waste the man. To converse with a man not worthy of conversation is to waste words. The wise waste neither men nor words.

Some people are monogamous from the get-go while other date as many people as possible until you have "that conversation." Have the conversation at the start so that everyone is clear.

That's a really sad moment. When people in a democracy are afraid of having the conversation, because it might actually lead to a conclusion they don't like, as opposed to saying, let's have the conversation, and let's learn, and, you know, let's, let me try to persuade you, and if I'm not persuading you, then you try to persuade me. That's what we hope for.

I regret that after 30 years of writing columns in this market, including ten with this newspaper that I love very much, this local conversation has come to an end. However, I believe that if the newspapers of the country pool their resources, we can send an Arnold-Schwartzenegger-style robot back in time to kill the inventor of the Internet, and then our future will be much brighter.

My wife will tell you it's the little things, like driving my boys to school on my days off so she can rest. We're not into PDA, but every time we end a phone conversation, we say 'sarang,' which means love in Korean.

We must carry things beyond conversation to conclusion.

I'm more likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger than to try any antic or pickup lines.

I think that there are many things in the New Testament that show us that the godliness of our conversation plays an important evangelistic role. The apostles are clear that we mustn't limit the explicit sharing of the gospel to formal preaching. It can also happen in ordinary conversations.

Did you ever see so many pee-wee hats, Carl?" "They're beanies." "They call them pee-wees in Brooklyn." "But I'm not in Brooklyn." "But you're still a Brooklynite." "I wouldn't want that to get around, Annie." "You don't mean that, Carl." "Ah, we might as well call them beanies, Annie." "Why?" "When in Rome do as the Romans do." "Do they call them beanies in Rome?" she asked artlessly. "This is the silliest conversation.

I think the best conversation to have been able to eavesdrop on was the one the minute after it was called that Trump would be the next president of the Unites States. Because by all indications, it does not seem anybody thought they were going to win. That is the moment I wish I could have been a fly on the wall. Or, like, in the microwave, whatever.

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.

I think you have to ask yourself does voting work on the level that you are trying to effectuate change; that is the conversation you must have.

We have two boys. After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, we had to explain to our older son, who was 12 at the time, how that could happen. Instead of hugging and consoling him, my husband pulled out a documentary about Emmett Till and showed it to him and started to talk about how the justice system works in this country - and how it often doesn't. From that conversation, our son wrote a short story about Trayvon Martin going to heaven to meet Emmett Till.

Wisdom, in the world of enlightenment, is not gained through conversation. Wisdom and enlightenment is something that you gain by making the mind still.

The noise around us determines how we speak. And how we listen. Just as a conversation suffers in a war zone, art suffers in a culture built on noise. So does our enjoyment of it.

You take a picture of yourself in some exceptional situation - skydiving or whatever. People always post those photos because it works - you're saying something about yourself that begs a conversation and that's what the users are there for.

I say it with my tongue firmly planted in cheek but there's truth to it - being a comedian is very close to being a therapist. When you're working smaller clubs, you're listening. You're feeling an energy, you're going with a tone but when people start yelling out, you almost start a conversation with people.

What was the point of even having a conversation when words couldn't be trusted?

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

I've only had a sit-down encounter with Robert once, and that one conversation was the best advice that I have gotten from any individual in the music industry. R Kelly told me that as long as I write life and not music I will always have a job. He listened to several of my records and told me that they were great records and for that to come from a man who has produced hit after hit gave me a comfort and reassurance that making honest and good music was not in vain.

I feel like we are so much more comfortable sweeping things under the rug and putting on a brave face, and to me, sweeping under the rug is a coward move, not a brave move at all. I want to get out there and have a conversation.

[Henry Miller] was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation - and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.

Oxytocin is the hormone of love. We share it when we have a good conversation, we share it when we make love, and when we hug, and BIRTH is the biggest brightest time of rich oxytocin-sharing.

Design is about creating spaces for people to enjoy and of course, creating moments where you elevate the spirit, but 'design for good' is figuring out a program that not only creates better spaces, but creates jobs, creates new industry and really kind of raises the conversation about how we rebuild.

I've noticed lately that it seems most intimate to not use any closing on your e-mail at all, because it seems to make it feel like you are engaged in an ongoing conversation - as if this one e-mail doesn't represent the beginning and end of the interaction but is just part of a perpetual loop of friendly back-and-forth.

Conversation is an abandonment to ideas, a surrender to persons.

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation.

Making photographs that dealt with the understanding of who I am as a gay man and dealt with the process of accepting that, and also accepting what I'm into sexually, what sexually arouses me. So I was making these images not necessarily knowing what they were about, but just putting it out there - that mode of thinking or consideration of my own desires, and also the much larger conversation around images that deal with ideas of sexuality and how those images are distributed and then accepted or understood by whoever is viewing those images.

I don't know your story or your dreams or the things that steal your sleep, but I know they matter. I hope you story is rich with characters, rich with friends and conversation. I hope you know some people who carry you, and I hope you have the honor of carrying them. I hope that there's beauty in your memories, and I hope it doesn't haunt you. And if it does, then I hope there is someone who will walk you through the night and remind you of the promise of the sunrise, that beauty keeps coming, that there are futures worth waiting and fighting for, and that you were made to dream.

Within each of us there is an intense need to feel that we belong. This feeling of unity and togetherness comes through the warmth of a smile, a handshake, or a hug, through laughter and unspoken demonstrations of love. It comes in the quiet, reverent moments of soft conversation and in listening.

There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.

What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.

In today's world of blogging and tweeting, conversation has become a bit more staccato. In many ways we're more efficient, but I think the amount of longer conversations that radiated more warmth may have gone down.

Silence is also conversation.

Whenever Percy stopped by to see [Annabeth], she was so lost in thought that the conversation went something like this: Percy: 'Hey, how's it going?' Annabeth: 'Uh, no thanks.' Percy: 'Okay...have you eaten anything today?' Annabeth: 'I think Leo is on duty. Ask him.' Percy: 'So, my hair is on fire.' Annabeth: 'Okay, in a while.

I search his eyes for the slightest sign of anything, fear, remorse, anger. But there's only the same look of amusement that ended our last conversation. It's as if he's speaking the words again. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other." He's right. We did. The point of my arrow shifts upward. I release the string. And President Coin collapses over the side of the balcony and plunges to the ground. Dead.

In my book ["Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age], I argue that we're vulnerable to technologies.There's a 40 percent decline in all markers for empathy among college students, with most of it taking place in the past years.