Quotes About Chatter

“Beneath all the chatter and the liturgy runs a fierce nostalgia for the literary myths of the past, for the gigantic figures of Dickens and Joyce, Hemingway and Faulkner. A writer can't even aim at that kind of aura today. But it's that yearning for imagined greatness that drives the whole literary enterprise. Plus the publishers' desperation to manufacture a bestseller to pay the bills. The idea of greatness is a marketing tool. See Franzen.”

— Tim Parks

“Scarcely has night arrived to undeceive, unfurling her wings of crepe (wings drained even of the glimmer just now dying in the tree-tops); scarcely has the last glint still dancing on the burnished metal heights of the tall towers ceased to fade, like a still glowing coal in a spent brazier, which whitens gradually beneath the ashes, and soon is indistinguishable from the abandoned hearth, than a fearful murmur rises amongst them, their teeth chatter with despair and rage, they hasten and scatter in their dread, finding witches everywhere, and ghosts. It is night ... and Hell will gape once more.”

— Charles Nodier

“He found himself smiling and talking politely to people who desired to show their respect and admiration for his uniform-instead of ignoring them and turning away. His sense of separation from and annoyance with these men and women who talked so glibly of war and who had not the faintest notion of what war was ebbed away; and he began to accept the fact that to chatter nonsense with neither knowledge nor perception was the ordinary manner of mankind.”

— Howard Fast

“It is possible to stop the mental chatter, regain your emotional balance and live free of stress and anxiety when you create a new habit of daily energetic self-care using the four powerful tools in Nurturing Wellness through Radical Self-Care.”

— Janet Gallagher Nestor

“There is something wonderful that happens between true friends.When they find themselves no longer wasting time with meaningless chatter.Instead, they become content just to share each other's company. It is the opinion of some that this sort of friendship is the only kind worth having. While jokes and anecdotes are nice, they do not compare with the beauty of shared solitude.”

— Jonathan Auxier

“Okay, let's cut the chatter. Open Mike Night's not 'til Tuesday.' Ruby's voice broke in. He must have had a van full of people to do that, as he normally let the comedians in the group rant away at will.
Sorry, Rube.' It was Danny, in the blue van.
Danny, you weren't even talking just now.'
I know.'
Then what are you apologizing for?”

— Vincent H. O'Neil

“Mind chatter: a clatter of left-brain rains of doubt, worry, guilt, shame in a thunderstorm of fear. Forgive the chatter, clear your mind.”

— Soul Dancer

“The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.”

— Peter Ackroyd

“Anyone who has learned the Quran and holds it lovingly in his heart will 'value his nights when people are asleep, his days when people are given to excess, his grief when people are joyful, his weeping when people laugh, his silence when people chatter and his humility when people are arrogant'. In other words every moment of life will be precious to him, and he should therefore be 'gentle', never harsh nor quarrelsome, 'nor one who makes a clamour in the market nor one who is quick to anger'.”

— Ibn Mas'ud

“The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one's fingers.”

— Arthur Koestler

“To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.
A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.”

— Sarah Manguso

“If through all thy discouragemnets thy condition prove worse and worse, so that thou canst not pray, but are struck dumb when thou comest into his presence, as David, then fall making signs when thou canst not speak; groan, sigh, sob, "chatter, "as Hezekiah did; bemoan thyself for thine unworthiness, and desire Christ to speak thy requests for thee, and God to hear him for thee.”

— Thomas Goodwin

“A long mission was ahead of them, and no one wanted to get on anyone else's nerves with unnecessary chatter.”

— Allen Steele

“I will not be distracted by noise, chatter, or setbacks. Patience, commitment, grace, and purpose will guide me.”

— Louise L. Hay

“A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.”

— Robert McKee

“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble, and from babble to confusion.”

— René Daumal

“Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship's more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.”

— Truman Capote

“The dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. they will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can't understand them, they frown and move away.
The dead aren't scary. They're just sad.”

— Rick Riordan

“Tongue on your words to taste you there
Couldn't   read what you
had never written there
Played your message over
feeling bad
Played your message over it was all I had
To tell me what and wherefore
this is what it said:
I'm tired of you asking me why
I'm tired of words like the chatter of birds
Give me a pass, let me just get by”

— Adrienne Rich

“A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

— Virginia Woolf

“If some watcher or holy one who has spent his glad centuries by the sea of fire were to come to earth, how meaningless to him would be the ceaseless chatter of the busy tribes of men. How strange to him and how empty would sound the flat, stale, and profitless words heard in the average pulpit from week to week. And we're such a one to speak on earth would he not speak of God? Would he not charm and fascinate his hearers with rapturous descriptions of the Godhead? And after hearing him could we ever again consent to listen to anything less than theology, the doctrine of God? Would we not thereafter demand of those who would presume to teach us that they speak to us from the mount of divine vision or remain silent altogether?”

— A.W. Tozer

“Born as the raising to the nth power of that initial (and rational) waste that is sports recreation, sports chatter is the glorification of Waste, and therefore the maximum point of Consumption. On it and in it the consumer civilization man actually consumes himself (and every possibility of thematizing and judging the enforced consumption to which his is invited and subjected).”

— Umberto Eco

“Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“Noreen didn't speak, and as the minutes passed she seemed to fade into the rummaging breeze and chatter of insects, as if the night itself were alive.”

— Jennifer Egan

“The casino played a song of its own-slot machines dinging, chips clacking as the dealer passed them out to the players at the tables, and the chatter of people throwing down money with the hope of hitting it big. It was like a carnival for adults. A person could get lost for days in a place like this.”

— Michelle Madow

“A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.”

— Sufjan Stevens

“As the 2012 elections approach the finish line, the chatter among columnists and political reporters is about upcoming books that take readers inside the campaigns, cutting-edge efforts to micro-target voters on Internet social applications, the enormous money flowing through super-PACs, and extreme political polarization.”

— Juan Williams

“But the real enemy is the cold. It steals up on you quieter than Will, and at first you shiver and your teeth chatter and you stamp your feet and dream of mulled wine and nice hot fires. It burns, it does. Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it. It's easier just to sit down ot go to sleep. They say you don't feel any pain toward the end. First you go weak and drowsy, and everything starts to fade, and then it's like sinking into a sea of warm milk. Peaceful, like.”

— George R.R. Martin

“I don't immerse myself in the Internet chatter because it opens you up to a whole source of danger.”

— Zachary Quinto

“Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now. It's like war. Everyone is handsome, shining, just thinking about other people's blood. As though the red was flying from veins not theirs is facial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting. Glamorous. Afterward there will be some chatter and recapitulation of what went on; nothing though like the action itself and the beat that pumps the heart. In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered, alliances rearranged. Partners and rivals devastated; new pairings triumphant. The knockout possibilities knock Dorcas out because here
with grown-ups and as in war
people play for keeps.”

— Toni Morrison

“Here is a dirty little secret: Stock-picking is wildly overrated. Sure, it makes for great cocktail party chatter, and what is more fun than delving into a company's new products? But the truth is that individual stocks are riskier than broad indices.”

— Barry Ritholtz

“Enough mind chatter. I imagined every thought encapsulated in a bubble; I exhaled them into the world. Gradually the noise ceased, and my mind was dark and still.”

— Rachel Hartman

“It is a hallow feeling to be in the company of someone with whom we long to have a satisfying personal exchange, only to watch hope dissolve as the time together is drained by superficial chatter or surface distractions.”

— Richard J. Foster

“He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.”

— Zadie Smith

“Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.”

— Graham Greene

“Grace leaned against Colin, who was silently watching the lively chatter. That was characteristic of him, actually. And then she realized that they were a pair, a silent, observant couple.
Still, in the circle of his arm, she wasn't a lonely observer. She wasn't a wallflower, anymore. She could be herself rather than wishing she was more vivacious, more full of chatter, more like Lily.”

— Eloisa James

“If you cannot fashion your life as you would like,
endeavour to do this at least,
as much as you can: do not trivialize it
through too much contact with the world,
through too much activity and chatter.
Do not trivialize your life by parading it,
running around and displaying it
in the daily stupidity
of cliques and gatherings
until it becomes like a tiresome guest.
("As Much As You Can")”

— Constantine P. Cavafy

“The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will's spirits and the intellect's chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with a stilled tongue. Fuge, tace, quiesce. The waiting itself is the thing.”

— Annie Dillard

“When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn't thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares.”

— Charles Stross

“The sky pulsed with stars. Some people say it makes them lonesome when they stare up at the night sky. I can't imagine why. There's no shortage of company. By now there's not a constellation I can't name. Orion. Lupus. Serpens. Hercules. Draco. My father taught me all of their stories. So when I look up I see a galaxy of adventures and heroes and villains, all jostling together and trying to outdo one another, and I sometimes want to tell them to hush up and not distract me with their chatter. I've glimpsed all the stars ever discovered by astronomers, and plenty that haven't been.”

— Kenneth Oppel

“The supper was like most Parisian suppers: silence at first, then a burst of unintelligible chatter, then witticisms that were mostly vapid, false rumors, bad reasonings, a little politics and a great deal of slander; they even spoke about new books.”

— Voltaire

“P68- when a word is deprived of its dimension of action,reflection automatically suffers as well and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism,into an alienated and alienating "blah". It becomes an empty word that cant denounce the world.”

— Paulo Freire

“Unless Sophronia missed her guess, the poor lad was already developing romantic feelings toward her friend. Many of the sooties probably were. Dimity was so pretty and chattery, she quite overpowered the average male. Many gentlemen were unable to cope with abundant chatter, which is why they so often married it.”

— Gail Carriger

“To her friends said the Bright one in chatter, "I have learned something new about matter: My speed was so great, Much increased was my weight, Yet I failed to become any fatter!"”

— Arthur Henry Reginald Buller

“Teach people to let go of their superficial mental chatter and obsessions. Teach people to pay attention to the whole body's reaction to a situation.”

— John Heider

“If an opinion can eventually go to the determination of a practical belief, it, in so far, becomes itself a practical belief; and every proposition that is not pure metaphysical jargon and chatter must have some possible bearing upon practice.”

— Charles Sanders Peirce

“Your preschool child will chatter endlessly to you. If you half-listen and half-reply the whole conversation will seem, and become, tediously meaningless for both of you. but if you really listen and really answer, he will talk more and what he says will make more sense.”

— Penelope Leach

“If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter. The war of the giants is over and the pigmies will now start to squabble.”

— Winston Churchill

“When the wisdom of the heart replaces the chatter of the mind, The power of Love flows forth.”

— Marianne Williamson