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Conversation quotes

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“My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.” Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Ah, good conversation—there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess . . . of conversing easily with those I have never seen before.” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde, The Remarkable Rocket

“And we change people through conversation, not through censorship.” JAY-Z, Decoded

“The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.” Honoré de Balzac, Letters of Two Brides

“I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and...” J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.” Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas.” W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“They have a notion, that when people are met together, a short silence does much improve conversation: this I found to be true; for during those little intermissions of talk, new ideas would arise in their minds, which very much enlivened the...” Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

“Her reputation of reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature.” Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“When she had failed once or twice to respond to some conversational gambit or other, Bond also relapsed into silence and occupied himself with his own gloomy thoughts.” Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.” Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, of which they make no use in the specialised...” Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.” W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.” J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Related topics

silence ideas cleverness women stupidity change understanding science reading books thought talking drinking intelligence censorship question calm lover worth husband

Related authors

Jane Austen (2)
J. D. Salinger (2)
W. Somerset Maugham (2)
Edith Wharton (1)
Oscar Wilde (1)
Chuck Palahniuk (1)
JAY-Z (1)
Samuel Beckett (1)
Marcel Proust (1)
Honoré de Balzac (1)
Henry James (1)
Ian Fleming (1)
Jonathan Swift (1)

Related sources

Of Human Bondage (2)
The Age of Innocence (1)
Pride and Prejudice (1)
The Catcher in the Rye (1)
Waiting for Godot (1)
Invisible Monsters (1)
Decoded (1)
Franny and Zooey (1)
The Portrait of a Lady (1)
Swann's Way (1)
Letters of Two Brides (1)
The Remarkable Rocket (1)
Casino Royale (1)
Gulliver's Travels (1)
Persuasion (1)