listening

If God places a child before you, and you are too busy to wield either a positive or negative influence...you just did the later! You communicated that the child doesn't matter and isn't important.

The cliché is true: People don't care what we know until they know we care.

Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you. Listen in such a way that others love to speak to you.

The art of conversation lies in listening.

And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear. He listened to the wind and the falling ocean and my voice, always with rapt attention, a concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and kept only the sounds.

Each of us has one. Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.

How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?

In my experience when a friend unloaded about a boyfriend or spouse, the listener soaked up the complaint and remembered it long after the speaker had forgiven the offense.

She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.

Like most so-called debates between liberals and conservatives, they weren__ interested in listening or responding to each other. They were solely concerned with making sound bites.

If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical accent. It expresses the fact that, in general, we are not at all ready to hear things in there own being, that they are subjected to man's calculus and to his domination of nature through the rationality of science.

Auntie Yang is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.

What good was speaking when I'd determined none of the world listened to one another, especially not when a woman was speaking.

I believe my mother was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she'd get one-syllable answers.

More than anything else, your people want you to listen to them.

Our civic life is heavily marked__ndeed, pocked__y debates in which each side is so certain of its position that any movement is effectively impossible. For that matter, debate__n its original sense of __o consider something, to deliberate___s impossible. We wind up with so much sound and fury and nothing gained.

When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another's need to speak, be our silent statement.

To listen to what I'd heard - as if I'd already learned everything I needed.