Your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious, pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy. (Love’s Labour’s Lost)
Conversation Quotes
It gets you nowhere if the other person’s tail is only just in sight for the second half of the conversation.
He (Macaulay) has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
I like talking to Rabbit. He talks about sensible things. He doesn’t use long, difficult words, like Owl. He uses short, easy words, like ‘What about lunch’ and ‘Help yourself, Pooh’. I suppose I really ought to go and see Rabbit.
Argument is the worst sort of conversation.
“I should like balls infinitely better,” she said, “if they were carried on in a different manner… It would be surely be more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.” To which her brother replied, “Much more rational, I dare say, but it would not be near so much like […]
My idea of an agreeable person, is a person who agrees with me.
Every man has some favorite topic of conversation, on which, by a feigned seriousness of attention, he may be drawn to expatiate without end.
The starting point of conversation is contradiction, and this democratic manners do not tolerate. Contradiction implies that one or another of the conversing group must be wrong, and under modern manners… peculiar feelings cling to error.
The desert has its holiness of silence, the crowd its holiness of conversation.
