communication
There is a time for many words and there is a time for sleep.
The Odyssey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 136.
The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared.
“Letters are Acts of Faith; Telephone Calls Are a Reflex,” The New York Times, July 31, 1994.
Words shouted into a fierce gale which is anyway blowing in the wrong direction.
Letter to James Wood, dated September 9, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 525–26.
As ever (whatever that is),
The closing of the letter to John Hunt, dated September 13, 1995, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 509.
Society is held together by communication and information.
The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol 3 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 11.
I don’t think I like writing letters in type. It is slow, and then it seems so terribly public. I am shocked at what I put down, as though it had appeared in the newspapers. Also, it looks too permanent, too definite and irrefutable. It embarrasses me, too, like talking over the long-distance telephone.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 127.
When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange.
I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else’s: surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you.
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 73.
The one thing that’s a bit of a drag is the hyper-dominance of Facebook and Twitter, [which] feels really monolithic and dull to me. I don’t like the way they look, I don’t like the way they feel. I feel like they’re huge Soviet apartment blocks that we’ve all been forced to live in. And if you want to really reach a lot of people, you bloody well better get yourself an apartment there. But it’s going to look like everyone else’s apartment, and you’re going to have to communicate through their Soviet centralised communication system. I don’t even think the metaphor is a bad one; because everyone is watching. Certainly the advertisers are watching. That’s why these entities are so valuable.
“The Q&A: Jennifer Egan, Novelist,” by Alexander Benaim, More Intelligent Life .
The most powerful tool of all is the word no.
“What I’ve Learned: Andy Grove,” by Mike Sager, Esquire, May 1, 2000.