Garth Stein Quotes

Conversation: The slowest form of human communication.

It is really hard to completely re-learn how to express yourself without using words. When you take away speech, you have to re-invent the way you express yourself. You have to exaggerate your body language and your facial expressions.

Well, usually when a person shakes their head," said McGonagall coldly, "they mean 'no.' So unless Miss Edgecombe is using a form of sign language as yet unknown to humans.

Don't let it worry you, not being able to speak,'Dustfinger had often told her. 'People tend not to listen anyway, right?

Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.

How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

Speak and speed: the close mouth catches no flies.

Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues And they found it useful to give names to things Much for the same reason that we see children now Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak And point their fingers at things which appear before them.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

Communication is my thing.

The quality of business communications has become poorer in recent years as people avoid phone calls and face-to-face meetings, I can only assume, in some misguided quest for efficiency.

When mouths close, it’s because there’s something important to be said.

You can't improve on saying nothing.

Words are a wonderful form of communication, but they will never replace kisses and punches.

The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

To understand is nothing, but to be understood-that is the problem and the source of anguish. The soul throbs and would have the other know-but can not and feels isolated. Then come gestures, words, awkward explanations and material symbols for imponderable outbursts of feeling-and the soul despairs.

Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.

Speech is great, but silence is greater.

Tell no man anything, for no man listens Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.

Communication is to relationships what breath is to life.