Audra McDonald Quotes

For me, anyone who is over 80, I generally sit down and have a chat to because he is over 80, and he is going OK.

I spent over 90 percent of my time talking to people who didn’t have to listen to me.

I have a great affinity for senior citizens.

Communicating with a man is a very new experience for me.

Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop!

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

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

For now I'm building up stories for the retirement home!

The best thing I could say is you do have to be a really good listener. If I go to a family reunion, and there's 400 people there, everybody comes up and tells me their stories, right? And I think that when you're a good listener, and you can imagine how someone's talking, dialogue is your key friend, is it not?

Sure, I'm for helping the elderly. I'm going to be old myself someday.

I worked at a nursing home though high school... There's a lost appreciation for a generation that has so much to tell us when we're so full of self-help books and doctors on TV.

I like people. I like to speak to people, engage with people.

The emotional side of humans interacting with each other is what makes TaskRabbit what it is.

I feel that we Germans are spending less and less time talking to each other. And even less time listening to each other.

I'm the biggest fan of face-to-face communication.

My problem is that I love talking to people. I remember working in a call centre in Dalston and I'd end up having these long chats with old women.

To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

Our phones do play to our natural nervousness about being vulnerable to each other, but that doesn't mean that we can't we can't pull ourselves together, and say - we need to talk to each because it's in conversation, the most human and humanizing thing that we do, that empathy is born, that intimacy is born, that relationship is born.

Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.

A good conversation always involves a certain amount of complaining. I like to bond over mutual hatreds and petty grievances.

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.

As the years progress one increasingly realises the importance of friendship and human solidarity. And if a 90-year-old may offer some unsolicited advice on this occasion, it would be that you, irrespective of your age, should place human solidarity, the concern for the other, at the centre of the values by which you live.

Growing old beats the alternative - dying young.