Deborah Tannen Quotes
-
Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's.
-
Maybe we're kind of predisposed to think that anything a politician does is calculated and therefore suspect.
-
There's the bond of a connection and the bond of bondage... When you are connected to somebody, everything each one does affects the other, and it's a kind of bondage. You're not as free as you would be if that person wasn't in your life.
-
Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.
-
For women, detailed conversation is our lifeblood, while for men it's just not as critical.
-
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.
-
Our ways of relating to each other become like habits.
-
There is more excitement, more amazement when a first is born. No subsequent babies can have that impact.
-
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.
-
I've long believed that if you understand how conversational styles work, you can make adjustments in conversations to get what you want in your relationships.
-
If you talk to your friends the way your parents talk, they will think you are stiff and odd.
-
There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns.
-
I think it is important to remember that there are so many different ways to be sisters.
-
While the requirements of a good leader and a good man are similar, the requirements of a good leader and a good woman are mutually exclusive. A good leader must be tough, but a good woman must not be. A good woman must be self-deprecating, but a good leader must not be.
-
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.
-
The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate.
-
My job is to analyze conversations and discover why communications fail.
-
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.
-
I wouldn't say that it's hard for sisters to treat each other with respect. Many do.
-
The culture of critique undermines the spirit not only of people in public roles but of those who read about them, afraid to believe in anyone or anything because the next story... will tell them why they shouldn't.
-
Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.
-
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'?
-
The death of compromise has become a threat to our nation as we confront crucial issues such as the debt ceiling and that most basic of legislative responsibilities: a federal budget. At stake is the very meaning of what had once seemed unshakable: 'the full faith and credit' of the U.S. government.
-
Everything you say in a family carries meaning from all that was said before. So with friends, there is less likelihood of a few words triggering associations from childhood, where our deepest emotions often are rooted.