#listening

People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer. ↗

— Alice Duer Miller

#talking #love

For a woman's words to wound would require a man to listen first! ↗

— Meredith Duran

#men #understanding #women #words #men

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. ↗

— Stephen R. Covey

#change

I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen. ↗

— Marlon James

#listening #men #men-and-women #secret #toni-morrison

So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme…. There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string. The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America. When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented. Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#love #poignant #courage

I was listening to the first record the other day, and it sounds remarkably contemporary. ↗

— Chris Bailey

#day #first #i #listening #other

I get embarrassed listening to my last CDs. I've got a lot of work to do, let's put it that way. ↗

— Bjork

#embarrassed #get #got #i #last

I agreed with everything he was saying when he ran for president. I was listening to what he said. I go, this guy thinks like me and I agree with him. Now he's changing. All he keeps saying is millionaires and billionaires don't pay their fair share of taxes. ↗

— Jon Lovitz

#agreed #billionaires #changing #everything #fair

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear. ↗

— Paul Merton

#hear #improvisation #listening #other #people

I didn't really see the British punk movement, if that's what it was, as wildly original, because I had been listening so intently to all the New York music since 1973, really. ↗

— Steven Patrick Morrissey

#been #british #had #i #intently