James Thurber Quotes

If we go on explaining we shall cease to understand one another.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

Translation is the art of failure.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

Avoid miscommunication. The price you pay for it is horrendous.

I am not very good at expressing myself in a simple way so it can create mis-understandings and I hate that.

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.

We find few disputes, that are not founded on some ambiguity in the expression [thereof].

I don't like making comparisons. You might say one slight thing, find yourself misinterpreted, and suddenly you're in trouble.

People are always throwing things at me that I've said and I say that I didn't mean anything.

Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstanding, I think,' said Anne.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

I think I get misinterpreted and misunderstood a lot.

Who would have thought that a means of communication limited to 140 characters would ever create misunderstanding?

The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong. And now it's all this.

A mutual misunderstanding.

It's dreadful what little things lead people to misunderstand each other.

The disconnect lasted too long. I think people got the idea I was sullen and couldn't communicate, which wasn't true.

I like that confusion when people are speaking in the same language but still can't understand each other. It's also usually my experience of being in America - when I speak no one can understand what I'm saying.

If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.

Don't assume you're always going to be understood. I wrote in a column that one should put a cup of liquid in the cavity of a turkey when roasting it. Someone wrote me that 'the turkey tasted great, but the plastic cup melted.