Deborah Tannen Quotes

#1. Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions.

Deborah Tannen

#2. The allure of love is to have someone who knows you so well that you don't have to explain yourself. It is the promise of someone who cares enough about you to protect you against the world of strangers who do not wish you well.

Deborah Tannen

#3. To say that a person feels listened to means a lot more than just their ideas get heard. It's a sign of respect. It makes people feel valued.

Deborah Tannen

#4. Many women feel it is natural to consult with their partners at every turn, while many men automatically make more decisions without consulting their partners.

Deborah Tannen

#5. Smashing heads does not open minds.

Deborah Tannen

#6. Words can be like weapons of destruction: It takes so much effort, and the cooperation of so many people, to build something - and so little effort of so few to tear it down.

Deborah Tannen

#7. More men feel comfortable doing "public speaking," while more women feel comfortable doing "private" speaking.

Deborah Tannen

#8. We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

Deborah Tannen

#9. Public discourse requires making an argument for a point of view, not having an argument - as in having a fight.

Deborah Tannen

#10. Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.

Deborah Tannen

#11. Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's.

Deborah Tannen

#12. In dialogue, there is opposition, yes, but no head-on collision. Smashing heads does not open minds.

Deborah Tannen

#13. Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball.

Deborah Tannen

#14. It can be the best of relationships and the worst of relationships - often at the same time. The bond between a mother and daughter is one of the strongest, but it's also among the most complicated.

Deborah Tannen

#15. We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

Deborah Tannen

#16. Treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same.

Deborah Tannen

#17. Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

Deborah Tannen

#18. Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.

Deborah Tannen

#19. Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication

Deborah Tannen

#20. Knowing that somewhere in the world there is someone who cares what you wore, an insignificant detail of your life that would seem unimportant to anyone else, makes you feel more connected to that person and less alone in the world.

Deborah Tannen

#21. Like most men, my father is interested in action. And this is why he disappoints my mother when she tells him she doesn't feel well and he offers to take her to the doctor. He is focused on what he can do, whereas she wants sympathy.

Deborah Tannen

#22. A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity--a ratification of one's way of being human and one's way in the world.

Deborah Tannen

#23. All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female - all result in different ways of talking ...

Deborah Tannen

#24. In an ongoing relationship, each current criticism packs the punches of all the others that have gone before.

Deborah Tannen

#25. Any criticism heard secondhand sounds worse than it would face to face. Words spoken out of our presence strike us as more powerful, just as people we know only by reputation seem larger than life.

Deborah Tannen

#26. But if you parry individuals points - a negative and defensive enterprise - you never step back and actively imagine a world in which a different system of ideas could be true - a positive act.

Deborah Tannen

#27. The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.

Deborah Tannen

#28. Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.

Deborah Tannen

#29. The key to conversation at work is flexibility and understanding how what you say might be perceived by others.

Deborah Tannen

#30. When those closest to us respond to events differently than we do, when they seem to see the same scene as part of a different play, when they say things that we could not imagine saying in the same circumstances, the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing is suddenly unsure.

Deborah Tannen

#31. Part of the reason images of women in positions of authority are marked by their gender is that the very notion of authority is associated with maleness.

Deborah Tannen

#32. False dichotomies are often at the heart of discord.

Deborah Tannen

#33. Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.

Deborah Tannen

#34. Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.

Deborah Tannen

#35. We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood - heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.

Deborah Tannen

#36. The chivalrous man who holds a door open or signals a woman to go ahead of him when he's driving is negotiating both status and connection.

Deborah Tannen

#37. Cooperation isn't the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict.

Deborah Tannen

#38. When people realize that in the long run you may be turning off the audiences more, even though they will look temporarily
in the end they turn away, we really need to develop other metaphors and not talk about two sides, but talk about all sides.

Deborah Tannen

#39. [T]he seeds of [the Argument Culture] can be found our classrooms, where a teacher will introduce an article or an idea ... setting up debates where people learn not to listen to each other because they're so busy trying to win the debate.

Deborah Tannen

#40. It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

Deborah Tannen

#41. For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

Deborah Tannen

#42. If women are often frustrated because men do not respond to their troubles by offering matching troubles, men are often frustrated because women do.

Deborah Tannen

#43. If women resent men's tendency to offer solutions to problems, men complain about women's refusal to take action to solve the problems.

Deborah Tannen

#44. Many men honestly do not know what women want, and women honestly do not know why men find what they want so hard to comprehend and deliver.

Deborah Tannen

#45. The desire for freedom and independence becomes more of an issue for many men in relationships, whereas interdependence and connection become more of an issue for many women.

Deborah Tannen

#46. Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.

Deborah Tannen

#47. All conversation, in addition to whatever else it does, displays, and asks for recognition of, our competence.

Deborah Tannen