Quotes about Communication

You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.

I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.

The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.

We are all such escape artists, you and I. We don't like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.

This is what I think, in essence, prayer is. It is the breaking of silence. It is the need to be known and the need to know. Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness.

If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell.

Preachers and theologians, who spend so much of their lives talking about God that, unless they are very careful, God starts to lose all reality for them and to become just a subject for metaphysical speculation.

Those who do not yet love one another deeply have need of words; those who deeply love thrive on silences.

We learn to speak through listening, and we grow in love of God through listening.

To love what we say, it must be true. To want to speak the truth, it must be loved.

God spoke to the Gentiles through nature and philosophers; to the Jews, through prophecies.

As a mother cannot forget the child of her womb, so a speaker cannot forget the child of his brain.