191 Quotes by Deborah Tannen

While boys create connections through friendly competition, girls create connections by downplaying competition and focusing on similarities.

We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.

Sometimes it's not self-evident whether a remark is truly meant to be hurtful or meant in the spirit of friendly teasing (or ambiguous or both at once). Between women and men, teasing is risky because playful insults are a common way of showing affection among boys and men but less so for most women—at least most American women. My husband tells me that one of the first things he learned about me was that he had to curb his impulse to tease me because I would be hurt rather than touched.

Each person’s life is lived as a series of conversations.

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.

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.

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.