Quarterly Conversation Quotes

The point of art is not to give you what you already feel comfortable with; that's reporting, not art, that TV, not art, that's magaziney art, not art. Art gives you so personal an interpretation that it compels you to say, This here is more real than what I know is really out there. ~ Andre Aciman

The reason why the book begins with the wish to "play back" how the two met is precisely to see if repeating the scenario might tell the narrator why he is so thoroughly smitten, to play with the scenario all over again, perhaps to master it, as Freud says about repetition. But there cannot be a "reason." An attraction that needs a reason is not a reason the heart or the body cares much about. ~ Andre Aciman

God does not require from you empty words or idle conversations ~ Sunday Adelaja

It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak. ~ Guy Debord

The process always starts with detailed conversations with the director, followed by a spotting session (deciding where the music goes and doesn't go in the film, and what the music should be saying or not saying) in each scene. This is followed by sending the director demos of each cue for feedback. ~ John Keltonic

Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you. ~ David Levithan

Thanks again, sir." Jules shook his hand again.
"You're welcome again," the captain said, his smile warm. "I'll be back aboard the ship myself at around nineteen hundred. If it's okay with you, I'll, uh, stop in, see how you're doing."
Son of a bitch. Was Jules getting hit on? Max looked at Webster again. He looked like a Marine. Muscles, meticulous uniform, well-groomed hair. That didn't make him gay. And he'd smiled warmly at Max, too. The man was friendly, personable. And yet . . .
Jules was flustered.
"Thanks," he said. "That would be . . . That'd be nice. Would you excuse me, though, for a sec? I've got to speak to Max, before I, uh . . . But I'll head over to the ship right away."
Webster shook Max's hand. "It was an honor meeting you, sir." He smiled again at Jules.
Okay, he hadn't smiled at Max like that.
Max waited until the captain and the medic both were out of earshot. "Is he - "
"Don't ask, don't tell." Jules said. "But, oh my God."
"He seems nice," Max said.
"Yes," Jules said. "Yes, he does."
"So. The White House?"
"Yeah. About that . . ." Jules took a deep breath. "I need to let you know that you might be getting a call from President Bryant."
"Might be," Max repeated.
"Yes," Jules said. "In a very definite way." He spoke quickly, trying to run his words together: "I had a very interesting conversation with him in which I kind of let slip that you'd resigned again and he was unhappy about tha ~ Suzanne Brockmann

SOLIDAO, LONELINESS.
What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth? ~ Pascal Mercier

I just like people. I'll hold a conversation at a gas station. It's not about the fame and the fortune, I just like people. ~ Lionel Richie

In her book Alone Together, MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle convincingly makes the case that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining. ~ Aziz Ansari

It is a wonderful thing that so many, and they not reckoned absurd, shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches and imagine such narrations their quota of conversation. ~ Richard Steele

Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible. ~ Paul Auster

I want to have a frank conversation about an inner sickness that I see few, if any, addressing: how and why Hollywood creates a f'd-up mirror for you to look in. How you are seeing yourself through your own eyes, but perhaps not your own mind. Hollywood affects your life in ways you may not even be aware of. ~ Rose McGowan

One man commented that he and I seemed to have different definitions of gossip. He said, 'To you it seems to be discussion of personal details about people known to the conversationalists. To me, it's a discussion of the weaknesses, character flaws, and failures of third persons, so that the participants in the conversation can feel superior to them. This seems unworthy, hence gossip is bad. ~ Deborah Tannen

But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave - a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you'd have in conversation with a friend. Even ~ Michel Houellebecq

You've tugged on your bonnet strings five times in this conversation already. Why wear one, if it's so uncomfortable? Have you any reason for it, other than that it is what everyone else does?"
"I brown terribly in the sunlight. I'll develop freckles."
"Oh no,. That sounds awful." He spoke with exaggerated solicitude, but he leaned down from his horse until his nose was a bare foot from hers. "Freckles. And what do those dastardly spots portend? Are freckled people thrown in prison? Pilloried? Covered in tar and sprinkled with tiny little down feathers? ~ Courtney Milan

Reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose
electronic or printed or audio
is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. ~ Will Schwalbe

Some preliminary conversation, he said, You look like you're in a good place, despite the bad times I understand you've been through. ~ Spencer Johnson

I guess it feels to me that the political argument that has been lost in my lifetime is taxation. How do you engage in that debate when people don't trust politicians at all? It is almost impossible to start a conversation about taxation. ~ Johann Lamont

If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary encironments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as "sacred" and "noble" – be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women have to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do so? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

His unfiltered conversation topics reminded me of my female sailor status: More than a hooker, less than a woman. I was a brick wall he could chuck rocks at all day and not feel a thing. But they hurt. God, they hurt. ~ Maggie Young

I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay. 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. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, 'I'm different.' If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand. ~ Jason Collins

The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn't know everybody's always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they're exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing's ever wrong, from seeing it. ~ David Foster Wallace

You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation. ~ Nicole Krauss

You certainly don't "need" to evangelize. You can rest assured that God is perfectly capable of bringing people to himself in His own good time and in His own good way. That said, though, it's very likely you will be galvanized by your own joy in the Lord to share that joy with others. It's only natural to want to share something wonderful you've found with everyone around you – and especially with those in your life for whom you have affection or care about. And if that life-enhancing, life-saving something you've found is absolutely free to anyone who will but ask for it, well.. Well then it's a wonder, isn't it, that every bible sold doesn't come with a bullhorn. The question of exactly when and how it's best for you to personally share your faith with others is one that the Holy Spirit stands ever ready to help you answer. Primarily, it's a matter of simply paying attention to the signals you get from non-christians about the degree to which they're ready to have a conversation in which it would be natural to talk about the value and nature of personal beliefs. Forcing that conversation is unlikely to prove productive to you or to the other person. You don't want to alienate someone by too zealously pushing Christ on them before they're optn to that sort of interaction with you.

The best rule of thumb when wondering how and when you should go about evangelizing is to just be yourself and relax about it. When it's time to talk to someone about Jesus, Jesus by H ~ Stephen Arterburn

I've never been convinced that everything in a relationship needs to be talked about. Some things can't be fixed by a conversation ~ Lisa Kleypas

I tell Jack by accident. We're talking on the phone about unprotected sex, how it isn't good for people with our particular temperament, our anxiety like an incorrigible weed. He asks if I've had any sex that was "really stressful," and out the story comes, before I can even consider how to share it. Jack is upset. Angry, though not at me. I'm crying, even though I don't want to. It's not cathartic, or helping me prove my point. I still make joke after joke, but my tears are betraying me, making me appear clear about my pain when I'm not. Jack is in Belgium. It's late there, he's so tired, and I'd rather not be having this conversation this way. "It isn't your fault," he tells me, thinking it's what I need to hear. "There's no version of this where it's your fault." I feel like there are fifty ways it's my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little bit easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us. I never gave him permission. In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking. I curl up against the wall, wishing I hadn't told him. "I love you so much," he says. "I'm so sorry that happened." Then his voice changes, from pity to som ~ Lena Dunham

Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn't about manners; it's about a methodology of controlling the conversation. ~ Mikki Kendall

I'm adorable, first off. My sense of humor is stellar - obvs."
"Obvs," she echoes dryly.
"I'm extraordinarily skilled in the art of conversation."
She nods. "When it's about yourself, of course."
"Of course." I pretend to think it over some more. "Oh, and I'm a mind reader. No lie. I always know what the other person is thinking."
"Yeah? What am I thinking right now?" Allie challenges.
"That you want me to shut up and fuck you again."
She shakes her head in dismay. "Goddamn it. That's actually what I was thinking."
I smirk at her and tap my forehead. "Told ya. Mind reader. ~ Elle Kennedy

Charles' conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody's ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams. ~ Gustave Flaubert

These esoteric, intellectual debates-I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation, ~ Chris Christie