Our Conversation Quotes

#1. I have a contract but it's not a commitment in the ordinary sense. It's our ongoing conversation.

Diane Sawyer

#2. It is notorious that we speak no more than half-truths in our ordinary conversation, and even a soliloquy is likely to be affected by the apprehension that walls have ears.

Eric Linklater

#3. We can talk about courage and love and compassion until we sound like a greeting card store, but unless we're willing to have an honest conversation about what gets in the way of putting these into practice in our daily lives, we will never change. Never, ever.

Brene Brown

#4. To be influential in our conversations, we must first be aware of two things, (1) what do we want to bring to the conversation and (2) what do we want to bring out in others.

Bill Crawford

#5. Our words were a shaky ladder; all I could do was climb, uncertain if I was about to surmount a glorious peak or fall and smash myself on the rocks below.

Deva Fagan

#6. ...I often thought of our marriage as one long conversation.

Siri Hustvedt

#7. Its [Dreams from My Father] also a reflection about how we might start a better conversation in our democracy about how to solve problems, because it feels as if our political system - it just seems there is so much cynicism and negativity in our politics.

Barack Obama

#8. As they sat, Kathy de Bourgh smiled and said, Now that we've both apologized within the first thirty seconds of our conversation about women and power, shall we begin?

Curtis Sittenfeld

#9. So hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip ... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office.

Henry David Thoreau

#10. Our lives are shaped by our interactions with others. Whether we have a long conversation with a friend or simply place an order at a restaurant, every interaction makes a difference.

Donald O. Clifton

#11. Congress suffers a great deal of criticism for its partisan acrimony. But while we may disagree politically, and air our opposition in this chamber, it is the conversation behind the scenes that cements and defines our relationships.

Kay Bailey Hutchison

#12. Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice distracts us and misleads us into making assertions that in no way express our true opinions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#13. In our land of opportunities and distractions, it's hard to devote our attention to the quiet pleasures of reading. It's as if we live our lives in a noisy restaurant and can't have the intimate conversation we most yearn for.

Steve Leveen

#14. Custom is a shroud that conceals everything. Not without first encountering the uncustomary will we be able to recognize what is customary and, more importantly, to change it. Such is the impulse behind our conversation with the vampryoteuthis

Vilem Flusser

#15. Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.

Jeff VanderMeer

#16. Our daily conversation when we meet each other, whether it be in the office or on the campus or in the shop, should be concerned with the things of God.

Billy Graham

#17. Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgements, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm.

Antonin Sertillanges

#18. We have for too long been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness; we are no longer at all habituated to our own voices, except in conversation or from within the safety of a shouting crowd.

Teju Cole

#19. Among the arts of conversation no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companions, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind.

David Hume

#20. [The imagination] ... inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and ... a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit.

Marsilio Ficino

#21. I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.

Nick Hornby

#22. Develop serenity and quiet attitudes through your conversation. Depending upon the words we use and the tone in which we use them, we can talk ourselves into being nervous, high-strung, and upset. By our speech, we can also achieve quiet reactions. Talk peaceful to be peaceful.

Norman Vincent Peale

#23. I've had that conversation! "You had a minute! Why didn't you do that?" So if husbands could read our minds that would be great.

Mila Kunis

#24. The noise around us determines how we speak. And how we listen. Just as a conversation suffers in a war zone, art suffers in a culture built on noise. So does our enjoyment of it.

Michael Gungor

#25. It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

Nicholas A. Christakis

#26. What we love usually manages to get into our conversation. What is down in the well of the heart will come up in the bucket of the speech.

Vance Havner

#27. Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won't work.

Gary Johnson

#28. She glanced at Tyson, who'd lost interest in our conversation and was happily making toy boats out of cups and spoons in the lava.

Rick Riordan

#29. What you gotta understand is, in this conversation and in our fight, you're not in control.

Andre Ward

#30. 4.
On the first night of our honeymoon
we lie in bed, too exhausted for sex
or conversation. Instead, we listen
to the surf, wave after wave after wave.

Sherman Alexie

#31. I tried to imagine telling my parents the truth. In that regard, the phone conversation is had with my father in the Underground had been a preview of coming attractions. He's lost it. Our son is insane. Or on drugs. Or maybe not in enough drugs.

Ransom Riggs

#32. Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.

Luke Davies

#33. Our supper was only half an anchovy each, on a very little strip of bread and butter, and half a pint of ale between us; but the entertainment was in her conversation.

Benjamin Franklin

#34. Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

Brian Eno

#35. During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

Edward Carey

#36. Overheard today in restaurant: Can you stop listening to our conversation?

Demetri Martin

#37. Our ability to offer empathy can allow us to stay vulnerable, defuse potential violence, help us hear the word 'no' without taking it as a rejection, revive lifeless conversation, and even hear the feelings and needs expressed through silence.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#38. ...when we cease asking questions, when we stop being self-critical, and when we no longer engage with others, then we surrender our ability to grow--to progress. Let's begin the conversation.

Mehdi Ghafourifar

#39. The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation.

Glenn Close

#40. What I'm suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of "system" or "conversation" we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

Tim Parks

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

Deborah Tannen

#42. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.

Henry David Thoreau

#43. Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world.

David Whyte

#44. Can one, seeing the sun with one's sensuous eyes, not rejoice? But how much more joyful it is when the mind sees with its inner eye the Sun of justice, Christ! Then in truth one rejoices with angelic joy; of this the Apostle too said: 'Our conversation is in heaven' (Phil. 3:20).

Seraphim Of Sarov

#45. Conversation fertilizes our understanding and that is why customers are demanding that businesses converse with them rather than talk down to them.

J. N. HALM

#46. The critical importance of honest journalism and a free flowing, respectful national conversation needs to be had in our country. But it is being buried as collateral damage in a war whose battles include political correctness and ideological orthodoxy.

Juan Williams

#47. As an officer of the court, I'm taking the fifth," he said jokingly before adding, "I think this is a conversation we should pursue further once we've completed our business." He paused a brief moment and looked at her intently. "And I would like to pursue it.

Anna Wells

#48. We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

Larry Page

#49. Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we're going to have to change our traditions, our history; we're going to have to move into a different place as a nation.

Michelle Obama

#50. During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that's all. It was part of our job.

Patrick Stewart

#51. I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!

Frances Power Cobbe

#52. We talked across each other, our conversation at right angles, only meeting in the intersections of silence at story's end.

Harlan Ellison

#53. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

Michael Chabon

#54. Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.

Michel De Montaigne

#55. If we do not commend the Gospel to people by our holy walk and conversation, we shall not win them to Christ. Some little act of kindness will perhaps do more to influence them than any number of long sermons.

Dwight L. Moody

#56. Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure.

Jessica Valenti

#57. If we've deluded ourselves into thinking that our angry mass emails or conversation-stopping talking points serve as a ministry or carry out the purposes of God, we need to slow down and take a breath.

David Dark

#58. Angus thought about this. She was right. That was why our national conversation was so bad. Courtesy had been abandoned in favour of the put-down, the attack, the calculated sound bite. What sort of national conversation was that? The answer came to him immediately: none.

Alexander McCall Smith

#59. I simply wanted to experience the presence of this man who had revolutionized my understanding. After a while we sat in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls. And the mute desert seemed to carry on our conversation for us.

Huston Smith

#60. I find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. It is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind; onlyreaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. Our conversation is a smooth, and civil, and never-ending speculation merely.

Henry David Thoreau

#61. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.

Virginia Woolf

#62. We talked about desire and being jealous,
Our conversation a loose single gown
Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out
Like a book of manners in the wilderness.

Seamus Heaney

#63. The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.

Ashley Judd

#64. This marked the end of our toothbrush conversation.

Patrick DeWitt

#65. I see in my friends that don't have kids, when they come over, and the amount of times our conversation gets interrupted by my children. It's almost jarring.

Shannyn Sossamon

#66. Daemon: We can go live in a damn cave. Look, I'm a selfish person. You know that. And I don't want you to go through that, so I'm willing to say screw it and we cut our losses.
Katy: Really? What kind of life would that give us?
Daemon: Don't bring logic into this conversation.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#67. Our conversation rate has to go up before our conversion rate can go up.

Reggie McNeal

#68. We have put our words on steroids and amped the language up so high that unless we communicate in overdrive and hyperbole, we believe
perhaps correctly
that nobody will hear us. In the process, we've sacrificed nuance and judgement and distinction, and thereby cheapened the conversation.

Frank Luntz

#69. Maybe you could casually mention to Zoe that I'm not now, nor have I
ever been, an axe murderer."
"I'll see if I can work it into our next conversation," Flynn promised.

Nora Roberts

#70. Not that we'd had much opportunity for casual conversation - all our conversations so far had been focused on killing each other, killing something else, or trying not to get ourselves or anybody else killed.

Seanan McGuire

#71. Are you afraid a demon has escaped Hell in order to descend upon the Venetians?"

"I think there are a few who'd deserve it, but I'm also a man of science, and I believe that we all carry our own private infernos inside ourselves."

-Conversation between Majid and Mathias

Riccardo Bruni

#72. One thing i am sure of is that our brief conversation in the dark showed him who i really am. I am a dumb fuck.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#73. Angels can recognize the nature of our unique essence on the basis of nothing more than a brief conversation with us. From hearing the tone of our voice angels sense what we love; and from hearing what we say, angels sense our level of understanding.

Emanuel Swedenborg

#74. New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#75. Meaning is made in conversation, reality is created in communication, and knowledge is generated through social interaction ... Language is the vehicle through which we create our understanding of the world.

Diana Whitney

#76. I distinctly remember a conversation with my band in the van where I was having a complete meltdown. It was 1984, I think, and I was huddled in the back corner of our van and saying, "I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this." I didn't want to play any more shows. I just wanted to stop.

Michael Stipe

#77. Sitting around our kitchen table from a very early age on, we talked politics, and we talked policy. Never once can I ever remember my dad saying, 'Go away, this is an adult conversation.'

Cheri Bustos

#78. Musicians playing together, it's a conversation, and ideally I want our conversation to be really intriguing and interesting and beautiful.

Chris Robinson

#79. IF OUR PHONE CONVERSATION GETS DISCONNECTED, THERE'S NO NEED TO CALL BACK I get it. You get it. We take forever getting off the phone anyway. This was a blessing.

Mindy Kaling

#80. That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

Milan Kundera

#81. Christianity is not primarily a matter of externals, nevertheless it does find expression in conversation, habits, recreation, emphasis, and ambitions to be noted in our daily life.

Billy Graham

#82. The only reason why we wish to exchange thoughts is that we are different. If we were all the same, we would die dumb. No thought would be expressed after we found that our thoughts were precisely alike. We differ-our thoughts are different. Therefore the commerse that we call conversation.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#83. I demand for the unmarried mother, as a sacred channel of life, the same reverence and respect as for the married mother; for Maternity is a cosmic thing and once it has come to pass, our conversation must not be permitted to blaspheme it.

Ben Lindsey

#84. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray's Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#85. Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words.

Donalyn Miller

#86. When you see that earthly powers are not listening to you, that you are under siege in this city for four years and shot at without the international community doing anything to help, what should you do? Die?' he asked me in the course of our conversation. 'No, you pray to Heaven for help.

Kristiane Backer

#87. Shall we stay out here, so we won't wake your friends?
It was news to me that our conversation was going to last that long. Apparently, Bill hadn't come over just to borrow a cup of blood.

Charlaine Harris

#88. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road, and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#89. You're too clever to be a soldier." Then she shook her head. "Don't say it. I know. We need our soldiers to be clever. I do know."
"Thank you," he murmured. "You can do all of the conversation. Make it easier for me.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#90. In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being ... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God.

Thomas Merton

#91. Our challenge is to not look away, but rather to transform the field; to create a new political conversation, our own conversation, out of which we can speak our truth in our own way.

Marianne Williamson

#92. Today we may face some boring task or idle conversation that feels like a complete waste of time. Perhaps next week or next year we'll understand that nothing is wasted, that in the economy of our universe even a weed is simply a flower whose use has yet to be discovered.

Mort Crim

#93. We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the
meaning of it all.

William James

#94. Conversation augments pleasure and diminishes pain by our having shares in either; for silent woes are greatest, as silent satisfaction leas; since sometimes our pleasure would be none but for telling of it, and our grief insupportable but for participation.

William Wycherley

#95. What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation ... we must follow what brings us alive.

Jack Kornfield

#96. History is a process of transformation through conversation. In our efforts to produce change,we often forget how important it is to pay attention to what is being conserved.

Humberto Maturana

#97. The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.

Samuel Beckett

#98. Every conversation does not have to be blatantly spiritual for God to make it positively effectual. Sometimes God gives us favor with people who are touched or impressed with how we express ourselves because God empowered our words even when the listener couldn't distinguish the difference.

Beth Moore

#99. Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.

Sir Fulke Greville

#100. With self-awareness we can change our inner conversation about what we are feeling and create different outcomes in conversations with others. To create conversations for change we must be able to process ourselves and others through emotions.

Shawn Kent Hayashi