Chris Abani Quotes

Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is. We seldom play games--we aren't that sophisticated.

What women need to understand is that men don't communicate. It's not intentional or on purpose. We're just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.

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.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

Sometimes a lot of us men think we are doing everything for the woman we love, but there is an aspect of a woman a man doesn't understand.

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

The problem I have with making an intelligent statement is that some people then think it's not an isolated occurrence.

I don't believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.

What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They're not your blood. They're not your mind. You get in an argument.

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

I'm surprised sometimes at how some of my actions are misinterpreted.

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

I have always been communicative. I can't help it if I have been misunderstood. Sometimes, people don't like straight answers.

It's not what you tell your players that counts. It's what they hear.

People think I'm really melancholy and romantic and all whispery. I'm not at all. I'm very direct.

Interpretation blocks reception while masquerading as reception. Rightness does not need interpretation; it requires simple acceptance and nothing else.

It was strange how you could never form any conclusion from what women said. It was not that they did not know what they were talking about, but you never drew the right conclusions.

Women are good listeners, but it's a waste of time telling your troubles to a man unless there's something specific you want him to do.

Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.

... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

How was I to know? ... You didn't say anything.""I said lots of things," he corrected gently. "You just didn't hear them.

It is ill to praise, and worse to blame, the thing which you do not understand.

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