Deborah Tannen Quotes

How can it be so unclear to her when it's like the fingers on my hand to me?

i can't understand her" well son, you might as well try to understand the sun". derived form the book:fires of heaven by robert jordan.

When people don't understand what they're watching, a lot of what they perceive has to do with who they themselves are.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

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

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

From inside where I live, I feel like I just perceive events in a certain rational way. I often find it sad or poignant, and it may not make me laugh a bit. But I don't mind inventing a portrait that allows others to laugh if that's what they want to do.

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.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

I never quite know if what I do will be understood.

I mean, the type of art that I enjoy is art that - I enjoy a very broad spectrum, but I especially like art that leaves me a little confused and uncertain as to what just happened.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

Do not forget that others won’t see the problems the way you look at or vice versa.

I didn't quite get 'If I Loved You.' I didn't understand what they're saying. 'Why are they saying if? Are they flirting? Is she being coy? Does she know what she's getting into?' I didn't understand this woman.

There can be an easy way to interpret things some times and it seems like maybe I'm on the wrong side of those interpretations a lot of those times.

Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.

No two men see the world exactly alike, and different temperaments will apply in different ways a principle that they both acknowledge.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

Every fight is one between different angles of vision illuminating the same truth.

Between what I think, what I want to say, what I believe I say, what I say, what you want to hear, what you believe to hear, what you hear, what you want to understand, what you think you understand, what you understand...They are ten possibilities that we might have some problem communicating. But let's try anyway...

The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.