#conversation

[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.” “Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events. “So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#conversation #delilah-mcphee #humor #jules #paying-attention

I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell herself a joke and clap her hands together as she let out a laugh; she would murmur to the plants as she watered them, and offer encouragement to the food as she cooked it. Sometimes I would walk into a room and surprise her as she was regaling herself with some delightful story, and I remember how the sound would dry up in her mouth. She stood there, frozen in the headlights of my teenage scorn. ↗

— Dan Chaon

#headlights #talking #food

Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation? ↗

— Stella Gibbons

#endurance #intelligence

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. ↗

— Andrew Solomon

#depression #fear #life #speaking #words

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live. ↗

— Charles Taylor

#dialogue #life #parents #self #self-identity

Most bad," the host concluded. "If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them. ↗

— Mikhail Bulgakov

#wine #women #love

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#mind #nature

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. ↗

— George Adam Smith

#conspiracy #contrivance #conversation #diversion #ends

Body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words. ↗

— Deborah Bull

#before #body #body language #conversation #had

I don't believe that." She seems like suck a force,this reasonable girl who kills with a turn of her fingers. She would have left all this behind, if she had the chance. "I honestly don't remember," she sighs "I don't think I was strong in life. Now it seems like I loved every moment, that every breath was charmed and crisp." she clasps her hands comically to her chest and breaths in deep through her nose, then blows it out in a huff. "I probably didn't. For all my dreams and fancies, I can't recall being...what would you call it? Perky? ↗

— Kendare Blake

#cas #conversation #dreams