“We treat each other with exceeding courtesy; we says, it’s great to see you after all these years. Our tigers drink milk. Our hawks tread the ground. Our sharks have all drowned. Our wolves yawn beyond the open cage. Our snakes have shed their lightning, our apes their flights of fancy, our peacocks have renounced their plumes. The bats flew out of our hair long ago. We fall silent in mid-sentence, all smiles, past help. Our humans don’t know how to talk to one another.”
“It doesn t matter if people doesn t know that you do a good thing nor the right thing. But he nor she must know your expression of love.”
“In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.”
“I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It s the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it s a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They re digging deep and projecting out at the same time.”
“It s much easier to be convincing if you care about your topic. Figure out what s important to you about your message and speak from the heart.”
“She didn t say anything—at least, not with her mouth. Her eyes told me a different story. The only problem was that they each had a thousand tongues talking, each in a language I didn t speak.”
“Man s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.”
“Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.”
“Dream is a way to communicate invented by the heavenly beings.”
“Before you can be effective in communication with ANYONE else, you must know who YOU are. It begins with you. Believe me when I say, I don t need anyone s approval in this classroom ... I m great company for myself. Me, myself, and I ... we laugh a lot. (Said on the first week of class each phase, somewhat rewording each time, but the gist is always there).”
“In this age of instant communication, emoticons are replacing words, body language replacing language and visuals replacing text.”
“Why do you think, A.J., they say in unison, that you find these boys so attractive? I didn t say that this fiery chemical explosion leaps from somewhere inside me. Parents don t want to hear these things. I shrugged and said nothing. Maybe you should try sitting on the intensity, Mom suggests, just until your feelings catch up with reality. We could chain you to the water heater, Dad offers, until these little moments pass. You see what I m up against.”
“Just as we may, through an appalled realization that we were unaware of what was going on in the mind of one we thought we knew, come to wonder how we ever know what another person is thinking or feeling, so too we may, having on some occasion wanted badly to understand and having clearly failed, come to wonder how we ever manage to understand, and how we know that we have succeeded.”
“Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [...] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.”
“I have a significant and inescapable communication to enter into with them. Animals never grow smarter, but I do. Ours will be a rewarding relationship.”