Quotes About Conversation With Someone

“If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, I changed my mind.”

— Sherry Turkle

“Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World's Club bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn't have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one wanted to believe he was the first so badly). I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. I became tough. I had fun. I learned so much.
But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I'd danced enough. I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was.”

— Mohsin Hamid

“In a conversation with someone sharing gossip, the introvert's eyes glaze over and his brow furrows as he tries to comprehend how this conversation could interest anyone. This is not because the introvert is morally superior-he just doesn't get it. As we've discussed, introverts are energized and excited by ideas. Simply talking about people, what they do and who they know, is noise for the introvert. He'll be looking between the lines for some meaning, and this can be hard work! Before long, he'll be looking for a way out of the conversation.”

— Laurie A. Helgoe

“That's right, stupid little voice, bash all my hopes and dreams. Shut up and tell me how to start a conversation with someone who doesn't speak.”

— C. Kennedy

“It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

“Using words like "casual" and "hang out," and the time constraint, were all part of a strategy to make the visit a low-pressure event. It's a much better way to get someone to commit to time with a stranger than AFC-style dinner dating, which can be a painful, drawn-out affair that involves two people who may have nothing in common stuck together for an entire night of awkward conversation.”

— Neil Strauss

“When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. This moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim, something more than the person looks out.”

— John O'Donohue

“Do you suppose it's so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don't know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it's only with people we already know well and know know us well that we don't go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?”

— David Foster Wallace

“When's the last time you had a serious conversation with someone about the meaning of love? In this way, love is the mirror image of shame. We desperately don't want to experience shame, and we're not willing to talk about it.”

— Brené Brown

“I am always alone, pretending to be someone else or lost in a vast emptiness. I miss life. I miss conversation and laughter and shared joy and hurt. I miss dancing and painting. I miss waking up to a day with no evil in it - at least, none that I can see.”

— Stacey Jay

“Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered.”

— Emil Cioran

“I feel like my first conversation with someone, I really get a good feeling about who that person is and mainly about how open they are.”

— Elisabeth Shue

“There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.”

— Ralph Fiennes

“There is something about the South that accepts the supernatural. If you don't accept it and you're having a conversation with someone who does, it's just one of those polite things where you don't question their belief in ghosts. You just go, 'Oh, yeah, okay.' It's amazing to be able to have conversations like that.”

— Alice Englert

“In a girl I look for honesty above all, someone who I can carry on a conversation with, someone who has a good sense of humor, someone who's true to herself, and to top it, someone who can get ready for a date in less than ten minutes.”

— Erik Von Detten

“As an adult, I have often been deep in serious conversation with someone I've highly respected and seen them roll an eye as my mouth has mangled yet another magnificently conceived, clumsily articulated sentence. In my mind, the words are mellifluous as honey. In my mouth, they are shards of glass.”

— Kate Forsyth

“After my parents died, it took me months before I could carry on a conversation with someone who had not known them, who expected me to be young and sparkling and untouched by grief.”

— Jennifer Egan

“I had a conversation with someone the other day who said he wondered if perhaps LGBT Christians had a special role to play in teaching the church how to more thoughtfully engage issues surrounding gender and sexuality. I told him I didn't think that went far enough, that ever since the Gay Christian Network conference, I've been convinced that LGBT Christians have a special role to play in teaching the church how to be Christian. Christians who tell each other the truth. Christians who confess our sins and forgive our enemies. Christians who embrace our neighbors. Christians who sit together in our pain, and in our healing, and wait for resurrection.”

— Rachel Held Evans

“All I can say to you, if you look after your health, eat the right stuff, do enough exercise, keep your mind active, you might be around when you're 100 having this conversation with someone.”

— Gerry Harvey

“If you find yourself in conversation with someone you know and that person brings up someone you both know and before he says another word you mutter, "That guy's a fucking asshole," you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself dismissing universally acclaimed landmark achievements, saying, for example, "The Godfather is an okay movie," you might be bitter.”

— Marc Maron

“I've been divorced and I had to get back out there be single again and do some of that in the genuinely miserable state where you really do wonder what the hell is going on. And you feel like trying to have casual conversation with someone you don't know on the surface of the moon or something.”

— Hank Azaria

“Had probably never had a real conversation with anyone other than a woman I loved, and essentially it seemed unsurprising to me that the exchange of ideas with someone who doesn't know your body, is not in a position to secure its unhappiness or on the other hand to bring it joy, was a false and ultimately impossible exercise, for we are bodies, we are, above all, principally and almost uniquely bodies, and the state of our bodies constitutes the true explanation of the majority of our intellectual and moral conceptions.”

— Michel Houellebecq

“Prefer spacious interactions with fewer people. And it means that, when you converse, you are more interested in sharing ideas than in talking about people and what they're doing. In a conversation with someone sharing gossip, the introvert's eyes glaze over and his brow furrows as he tries to comprehend how this conversation could interest anyone. This is not because the introvert is morally superior-he just doesn't get it. As we've discussed, introverts are energized and excited by ideas. Simply talking about people, what they do and who they know, is noise for the introvert. He'll be looking between the lines for some meaning, and this can be hard work! Before long, he'll be looking for a way out of the conversation. But when an introvert is hanging out”

— Laurie A. Helgoe

“It's hilarious a lot of times. You have a conversation with someone, and he's like, 'You speak so well!' I'm like, 'What do you mean? Do you understand that's an insult?”

— Jay-Z

“You can't have a conversation with someone who's intimidated by you all the time.”

— Tila Tequila

“I don't really talk about my personal life. It's a strange and funny and weird thing. Sometimes you have a conversation with someone and the paparazzi snaps a picture of you and people decide you're dating. If I try to answer everything people say, I would be up all night.”

— Tracee Ellis Ross

“It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not a particular person, or very rarely.”

— Norman MacCaig

“For someone who has been so important to my career, I have had absolutely no interaction with O.J. Simpson one-on-one in my whole life. I've tried many times. I have written him in prison, I've had other contact ... but he never responded, so I have never had a conversation with O.J. Simpson, never met the guy.”

— Jeffrey Toobin

“It says that whenever people cross our paths, there is always a message for us. Chance encounters do not exist. But how we respond to these encounters determines whether we're able to receive the message. If we have a conversation with someone who crosses our path and we do not see a message pertaining to our current questions, it does not mean there was no message. It only means we missed it for some reason.”

— James Redfield

“My accent remained terrible. It was very hard for me to initiate any conversation with someone I didn't know.”

— Lawrence Welk

“Even professional, paid carers aren't always models of saintly behaviour - and they know they can knock off at the end of their shift to go home, take an uninterrupted shower, and have a normal conversation with someone.”

— Laurie Graham

“The difficulties (which other people surely find incredible) I have in speaking to people arise from the fact that my thinking, or rather the content of my consciousness, is entirely nebulous, that I remain undisturbed by this, so far as it concerns only myself, and am even occasionally self-satisfied; yet conversation with people demands pointedness, solidity, and sustained coherence, qualities not to be found in me. No one will want to lie in clouds of mist with me, and even if someone did, I couldn't expel the mist from my head; when two people come together it dissolves of itself and is nothing.”

— Franz Kafka

“Anyt hing that is found to stimulate hope should be seized upon and make to serve. This applies to a book, a film, a broadcast, or a conversation with someone who can impart it.”

— Hubert Van Zeller

“Bloody North," said Shev as she picked her way towards it and had a tentative drag at the ropes. "Even their bridges are shit."
"Their men are good," said Javre, clattering out with no fear whatsoever. "Far from subtle, but enthusiastic."
"Great," said Shev as she edged after, exchanging a mutually suspicious glance with a crow perched atop one of the posts. "Men. The one thing that interests me not at all."
"You should try them."
"I did. Once. Bloody useless. Like trying to have a conversation with someone who doesn't even speak your language, let alone understand the topic."
"Some are certainly more horizontally fluent than others."
"No. Just no. The hairiness, and the lumpiness, and the great big fumbling fingers and ... balls. I mean, balls. What's that about? That is one singularly unattractive piece of anatomy. That is just ... that is bad design, is what that is.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Alone-sex didn't count. It's like the difference between thinking to yourself or having a good conversation with someone
the pleasure is in the exchange.
-Liberty Jones”

— Lisa Kleypas

“Here's the thing about middle-class people. They pretend not to look, but they do. They're too polite to actually stare. Instead, they do this weird thing of catching sight of Will in their field of vision and then determinedly not looking at him. Until he's gone past, at which point their gaze flickers toward him, even while they remain in conversation with someone else. They won't talk about him, though. Because that would be rude.”

— Jojo Moyes

“Sometimes the most interesting part of the conversation with someone who can't lie is the questions they don't answer.”

— Patricia Briggs

“If you can't really have a conversation with someone candidly about it it's something that you'll always have something to learn from when it comes to taking a literature class.”

— Elizabeth Olsen

“Did you ever have a conversation with someone who misunderstood everything you had to say? It's exhausting, and the ironic part is that the more you try and explain yourself, the more mixed up things become. Your best friend knows when you're kidding, venting, and tired. He or she knows you and therefore doesn't read into the things you say.”

— Francois Mauriac

“After a conversation with someone that went on all night, but I didn't take much persuading, and the next day I was a vegetarian. It came down to one question, can you be healthy without killing animals? If the answer is 'yes' then the only reason you're killing is because you like the taste. But you can't take a life just because you like its taste.”

— Martin Shaw

“It's annoying when people tag my name in their conversation with someone else [on Twitter.]”

— Casper Smart

“Things that are present - whether it's a conversation with someone who is really grounded in the moment, a movie that feels authentic, or a moment in nature where you feel nothing but the present. It motivates me to truly ground myself, breathe, and push forward. Crashing waves.”

— Jonathan Keltz

“Start a conversation with someone with whom you have "nothing in common" and no possibility of scoring with, networking with, or even seeing again. In other words, a conversation just for the civilized hell of it.”

— Perry Brass

“Writing with voice is writing into which someone has breathed. It has that fluency, rhythm, and liveliness that exist naturally in the speech of most people when they are enjoying a conversation ... Writing with real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand
the words go deep.”

— Peter Elbow

“What if you lived your entire life completely without urgency? You went to classes, you ate your meals, on Saturday nights a boy you didn't love took you to the movies; now and then you actually had a conversation with someone. The rest of the time -the hours that weren't accounted for-you spent waiting for something to happen to you; when you were particularly desperate, you went out looking for it.”

— Joyce Johnson

“In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.”

— James A. Baldwin

“I found that people had all kinds of levels of consciousness, all kinds of levels of education, but that Cubans in general were very educated politically. I could go sit in a bus and get into a conversation with someone and that person had a wealth of knowledge. And energy!”

— Assata Shakur

“Ever try to have a conversation with someone on drugs? It just doesn't work ...”

— Frank Zappa

“If your wife briefly corrects someone with "Actually, I'm bisexual" during conversation, it hardly sounds like attempting to remain an object of desire to me. If she went around saying, "Actually, I'm still very interested in men, particularly you, you massive dose of sexual charisma," you might have a case.”

— Mallory Ortberg

“There's no way to be prepared for a conversation with someone you don't know about something that means the world to you.”

— Kristen Stewart