Deborah Tannen Quotes
I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm not a video brat. I don't derive all my inspiration through movies. I get it from a lot of other places, too.
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At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
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If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
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You gotta ask 'why' questions. 'Why did you do this?' A 'why' question you can't answer with one word.
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I'm very close with Bob and his lovely, fabulous wife Catherine, too.
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In the future, I want to have super-fights.
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My work has always been the thing that justifies my life.
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Speed can't always get you wickets.
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The 77 cents that women make for every dollar men earn makes a real difference to our families - families stretching to make every dollar count.
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There are moments when I am really not happy with how I look, or I think it would be an easy way out to try and do the conventionally attractive thing. But part of it is that I don't have the energy to put on, like, makeup. If people want to do that, that's fine. But I've learned that it's not for me.
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I was a huge comic book fan as a kid. The only problem I had with comic books is how expensive they got. I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to be very specific about what I wanted to collect. I think they're all somewhere in the basement of my folks' house.
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If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them.
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In the British Special Air Service, combat fitness is all about running.
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I wish I had read more and majored in literature rather than theatre. I think I would have been a better artist for it. I am trying to play catch-up now.
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You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.
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If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to. People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and 'The Great Gatsby' can provide that explanation.
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I think I owe it to myself to put my best effort forward and prove how good I can be.
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The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.
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Fashion is what you buy, style is what you do with it.
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It helps being from somewhere other than Hollywood, not having grown up with that sense of film-making. I really wasn't exposed to that as a young woman.
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The idea of fighting your new girlfriend's ex-lovers, 'Street Fighter' style, is the ultimate geek wish-fulfilment.
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Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems.
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I feel like it's important for young people - practically, young gay people - to know what to do and how to handle bigotry and opposition and where to go to have those resources of help and guidance. I think it's important.
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I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.
