Quotes by Deborah Tannen

“Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball”

“The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation -- or a relationship.”

“Many of us dismiss talk that does not convey important information as worthless - meaningless small talk if its a social setting or empty rhetoric if its public. Such admonitions as Skip the small talk, Get to the point, or Why dont you say what you mean? may seem to be reasonable. But they are reasonable only if information is all that counts. This attitude toward talk ignores the fact that people are emotionally involved with each other and that talking is the major way be establish, maintain, monitor and adjust our relationships.”

“We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.”

“Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.”

“Its our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. Its a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.”

“[T]he seeds of [the Argument Culture] can be found our classrooms, where a teacher will introduce an article or an idea . . . setting up debates where people learn not to listen to each other because theyre so busy trying to win the debate.”

“Each persons life is lived as a series of conversations.”

“When people realize that in the long run you may be turning off the audiences more, even though they will look temporarily--in the end they turn away, we really need to develop other metaphors and not talk about two sides, but talk about all sides.”

“Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.”

We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.

Communication is a continual balancing act juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world we have to act in concert with others but to survive as ourselves rather than simply as cogs in a wheel we have to act alone.

Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.

The Pavlovian view of women voters - plug the words in, and they will respond - sends a chill down my spine because it sounds like an adaptation of something I have written about communication between the sexes: When a woman tells a man about a problem, she doesnt want him to fix it; she just wants him to listen and let her know he understands.

I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen.

In a world of status, independence is key, because a primary means of establishing status is to tell others what to do, and taking orders is a marker of low status. Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the others.

When did the word compromise get compromised? When did the negative connotations of He was caught in a compromising position or She compromised her ethics replace the positive connotations of They reached a compromise?