Orson Scott Card Quotes

Men and women belong to different species and communications between them is still in its infancy.

It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.

No. Haven’t you been listening?” Marcus would always remember that moment. It was to be the first time he would ever be faced with that most vexing of female quirks: the question that had nothing but wrong answers.

Men don't know much about women. We do know when they're happy. We know when they're crying, and we know when they're pissed off. We just don't know in what order these are gonna come at us.

Not understanding anything is terrible, because I communicate very much in my real life.

Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.

I never know where women are coming from.

Supposedly I'm impossible to talk to. But it's honestly not me being difficult. Sometimes you just don't have a lot to say.

Difficulty empathising translates into a whole set of hurdles. You might be last person to get the point of a joke, which can leave you feeling like an outsider. You might end up saying something that another person finds hurtful or offensive, when that was the last thing you intended.

Sharmell was the first woman that I thought about talking to, and if you listen to Sharmell, she thought I hated her the first time we met because I was always all business.

Men need to be with women otherwise I don't think they really know how to behave. They'll just stare at me and it's awkward, so I scramble around in my mind to say the rudest things I can think of just to get something out of them.

To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand.

Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication

Many men honestly do not know what women want, and women honestly do not know why men find what they want so hard to comprehend and deliver.

We are different. We are equal in every way but our voices are important to each other and our need to want to listen to each other and try to understand, because sometimes we are so difficult to understand. Men to understand us, and we to understand men. And we don't. We don't connect the way we should.

Every time I say something they find hard to hear, they chalk it up to my anger, and never to their own fear.

I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wonder if I can ever act any other way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

If someone says, "Katie, you are out of order," over something I've said, or, "Katie, you are wrong," if I defend myself or justify myself, then I have just started the war.

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]

It is very difficult in quarreling to be certain in either one what the other one is remembering. It is very often astonishing to each one quarreling to find out what the other one was remembering for quarreling. Mostly in quarreling not any one is finding out what the other one is remembering for quarreling, what the other one is remembering from quarreling.

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.

Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.

Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in - particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities.

We can generally read a man's purpose towards us in his manner, if his purposes are of much moment to us.