Communication Quotes

Nobody listens any more.
I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me.
I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls.

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm anti-social, they say... I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it?. Social to me means talking about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice... But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not... They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball... Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lamp-posts, playing `chicken' and 'knock hub-caps. I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another... Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?"

They simply happen to regard sex as both a physical and a spiritual experience.

But if nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

Let me come in. I won't say anything. I just want to listen... What is it you're saying?

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not.