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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I pay a lot of attention to box office because I understand it. TV ratings? I don't know how to interpret them, since I'm new to TV, so I'm just going to wait for somebody to tell me.
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People who talk of the spread of music in England and the increasing love of it, rarely seem to know where the growth of the art is really strong and properly fostered: some day the press will awake to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North.
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I didn't know who she was, but I knew she was hungry, so I started handing out $100 bills and called the office and told them to bring me a bunch more. Then I had my cousin's store deliver a bunch of smoked ham and turkeys. I mean, these people are hungry and living under a bridge.
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If I just did music, I might go insane. I need words; I need stories. And it's the same the other way around.
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I have always been far more interested in sound than technique, and how sounds work together, how they can be layered. I think electronic music, in its infancy anyway, allowed us to create music in a way that hadn't really been possible before. It created a new kind of musician.
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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.
