Deborah Tannen Quotes
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Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.
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For women, detailed conversation is our lifeblood, while for men it's just not as critical.
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If you talk to your friends the way your parents talk, they will think you are stiff and odd.
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We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.
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I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always.
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There is more excitement, more amazement when a first is born. No subsequent babies can have that impact.
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Sister relationships span a huge range, from best friends to worst enemies. From 'I adore her; I talk to her five times a day' to 'I decided to cut her out of my life.' For most women, it's in between.
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Maybe we're kind of predisposed to think that anything a politician does is calculated and therefore suspect.
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In some ways, siblings, and especially sisters, are more influential in your childhood than your parents.
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Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book.
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In this world, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus. They try to protect themselves from others' attempts to push them away.
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Our ways of relating to each other become like habits.
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You're not from Puerto Rico, so you should say Puerto Rico like all the other people from the place that you come from.
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There are those who believe that the existence of gender differences at very early ages is evidence that these differences are biological or generic in origin.
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The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.
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When did the word 'compromise' get compromised? When did the negative connotations of 'He was caught in a compromising position' or 'She compromised her ethics' replace the positive connotations of 'They reached a compromise'?
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I think it is important to remember that there are so many different ways to be sisters.
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I wouldn't say that it's hard for sisters to treat each other with respect. Many do.
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The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate.
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I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation.
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Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different.
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My job is to analyze conversations and discover why communications fail.
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There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns.
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I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. For part of my life, I was living in Detroit, and I remember a friend of mine commenting she could always tell when I had been speaking to my mother because my New York accent had come back.