Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

The person who talks a lot or talks over people misses out because they weren't listening.

There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit.

Never ask a bore a question.

There is nothing I hate more than meeting someone who has forgotten the art of conversing.

It is all right to hold a conversation but you should let go of it now and then.

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

If we're all talking about something that doesn't matter, it can be bean talk. If we're talking about something that we're talking about together, it could be bean talk.

In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and, hopefully, in service of the other person. But unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than roughly half a minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty.

A big part of the challenge is teaching your kids how to have a real conversation, not a texting conversation. If they're not sitting down at the table, the art of conversation is going to go.

If a joke makes our tribe laugh, we assume it will make other friend-tribes laugh.

In China, people only talk to make a point. You ask someone to go to lunch. They say yes or they say no.

I think that people in Mexico talk too much.

You don't want to be one of these guys talking all the time, trying to say things all the time, because people start drowning you out.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.

Foxy girls know that silence may be golden-but only for four seconds. Anything longer and you're heading for Awkward Avenue.

If it were not for quotations, conversations between gentlemen would consist of an endless series of 'what-ho!'s.

conversation is like a dear little baby that is brought in to be handed round. You must rock it, nurse it, keep it on the move if you want it to keep smiling.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

I'm that person in the bar who's like, "Can they turn the music down? I would like to chat."