Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

My job is to analyze conversations and discover why communications fail.

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

I'm very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, 'That's the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.'

How I say it has as much of an impact on what people think of me as what I say.

I probably should be a little more cautious with how I speak, and I think my delivery needs to be a little softer.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

No one has to learn to spell to talk, right? You see a little kid holding a conversation with an adult. He probably doesn't know the words he's saying, but he knows where to fit them to make what he's thinking logical to what you're saying.

Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience.

It's not just about the words you use, but the way you use them, and the message that puts over. Also your face too and the way you project your message. If you're telling the group to stay calm, be good, and you have beads of sweat dripping down your forehead, you're in trouble.

I have always safely relied on my voice modulations. It has never let me down.

Once you break someone of the habit of up-talking, they can start to see immediate improvement in their careers.

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

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words.

It is one of the worst things of sentiment that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that what is spoken.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

I think the first time I was ever really conscious of the difference between people's voices was that my mother's voice was so soft and gentle and her pronunciation was so perfect.

It's very hard to come across as a passionate human being in print. People can't hear the inflections in your voice.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.

You can never get your message across if you're always answering their [reporter's] questions.

Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two 'languages.' It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.

I listen much better when I'm acting than I do in real life.