“I went to see [George] Santayana daily. The talk ranged from autobiography, philosophical theories on world politics, Aristotle’s theory of sensation, Spanish quotations, ideas on Boston, lots of very catty and very good gossip and above all Boston and religion. The meetings were delightful for me and perfect, except that he is deaf and couldn’t hear a word—shouted or whispered—that I said.”
Robert Lowell
more infosource: letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated December 6, 1950, written from Florence, in Words in Air (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 115.
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category: communication, deaf, friendship, George Santayana, philosophy
medium: Letter
“I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.”
George Saunders
more infosource: “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year,” by Joel Lovell, New York Times Magazine, January 3, 2013.
category: communication, creative process, self-improvement, writing
medium: Magazine profile
“I have never sent an email in my life. I never received an email. I have two buttons I can touch—the weather and the Huffington Post.”
Woody Allen
more infosource: “Older, Mellower, But Still Woody,” interview by Rachel Dodes, Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2012.
category: communication, e-mail, film, iPhone
medium: Interview
“Digital media is an amplifier. It tends to make extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted.”
Clay Shirky
more infosource: “Seeing Social Media More as Portal Than as Pitfall,” New York Times, by Perri Klass, January 9, 2012.
category: communication, extrovert, introvert, social media
medium: Newspaper article
“All this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.”
Margaret Atwood
more infosource: The Edible Woman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999), 112.
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category: communication, confession, introvert, socializing, talk
medium: Fiction
“I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast.”
Roger Ailes
more infosource: response to the shootings in Tucson, Arizona on January 8, 2011 and our country’s tense political climate, in “Exclusive: Roger Ailes & Russell Simmons: Both Sides Are Wrong,” Global Grind, January 10, 2011.
category: cable news, communication, language, politics, republican, television, toxic
medium: Interview
“Words shouted into a fierce gale which is anyway blowing in the wrong direction.”
Saul Bellow
more infosource: letter to James Wood, dated September 9, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 525–26.
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category: beautiful description, communication, love, words
medium: letter
As ever (whatever that is),
Saul Bellow
more infosource: the closing of the letter to John Hunt, dated September 13, 1995, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 509.
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category: communication, letter, sign offs
medium: letter
“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
Michel de Montaigne
more infosource: “Of the Education of Children,” in The Works of Michael de Montaigne (Philadelphia, PA: J. W. Moore, 1849), 86.
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category: communication, expression, quotation
medium: essay
“I just tweet; that’s just the way I roll.”
Sarah Palin
more infosource: “The Palin Network,” by Robert Draper, The New York Times, November 17, 2010.
category: communication, politics, tweet, Twitter
medium: newspaper profile
“Society is held together by communication and information.”
Samuel Johnson
more infosource: The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol 3 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 11.
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category: communication, information, society
medium: biography
notes: Submitted by Neil Steinberg (thanks, Neil), with this note: The sentiment is prosaic, but what makes this quote interesting, to me, is that it appears in a late-18th century book (1791, or so, I believe). We think of our society as being so modern and such a departure from the past, yet when we look closely at the past, it becomes less different from today than we first thought. Johnson's big challenges—getting paid for writing, having his work copied and ripped off—would certainly resonate with any blogger. The copy of "Life of Johnson" I read had marginal notes by Mrs. Thrale, Johnson's contemporary, and so read almost like a comments section on-line.
“I started to distrust telephones the instant they stopped working. I can’t pinpoint when that was—the first time I ‘dropped’ a call, or someone said, ‘I’m losing you’—and I don’t know why the telephone, the analog landline telephone, was never formally mourned.”
Virginia Heffernan
more infosource: “Funeral for a Friend,” The New York Times Magazine, October 29, 2010.
category: analog, communication, technology, telephone
medium: newspaper article
“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.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
more infosource: Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 127.
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category: communication, letter writing, technology
medium: letter
notes: letter to her sister, Elisabeth, from 1934
“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.”
Elizabeth McCracken
more infosource: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 73.
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category: card, communication, deaf, pain, tragedy, trauma
medium: memoir
“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.”
Jennifer Egan
more infosource: “The Q&A: Jennifer Egan, Novelist,” by Alexander Benaim, More Intelligent Life .
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category: advertisement, apartment, communication, Facebook, Internet, metaphor, monolithic, Russia, social media, Soviet, Twitter
medium: interview
via: The Bronze Medal
communication