 
|
"The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing."
-Anon.
|
|
|
|
"Silence is one great art of conversation."
-Anon.
|
|
|
|
"The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie."
-Hilaire Belloc, The Silence of the Sea
|
|
|
|
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
-Jorge Luis Borges
|
|
|
|
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
-Truman Capote
|
|
|
|
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. A lady of my acquaintance said, " I don't care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it."
http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=220
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Social Aims, 1876
|
|
|
|
"The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say -- because they were too obvious."
-André Gide, The Journals of André Gide
|
|
|
|
Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
|
|
|
|
"Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while."
-Kin Hubbard
|
|
|
|
The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.
-Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life, part 1, 1978
|
|
|
|
No animal should ever jump up on the dining room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.
-Fran Lebowitz
|
|
|
|
He speaketh not; and yet there lies
A conversation in his eyes.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Hanging of the Crane
|
|
|
|
"What great delight it is to see the ones we love and then to have speech with them."
-Vincent McNabb, God's Way of Mercy
|
|
|
|
Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, and so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.
-Charles Dudley Warner
|
|
|
|
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are interesting monologues, that is all.
-Rebecca West
|
|
Books about Conversation
