191 Quotes by Deborah Tannen

It was just so obvious that everyone wanted to talk about the mother-daughter relationship. I think it's because women really are struggling, because it's a very important relationship in your life.

If you come from, say, the northeastern part of the United States when you're listening you need to show you're alive. You need to talk along. That's the way you show you're interested. But in many parts of the United States if you talk along, that's rude, that's interruption. Now, we all agree interruption is rude. But we don't agree on what constitutes an interruption.

Cooperation isn’t the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict.

Communication is a system. Everything that is said is simultaneously an instigation and a reaction, a reaction and an instigation. Most of us tend to focus on the first part of that process while ignoring or downplaying the second. We see ourselves as reacting to what others say and do, without realizing that their actions or words are in part reactions to ours, and that our reactions to them won’t be the end of the process but rather will trigger more reactions, in a continuous stream.

Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication.

Second, there is a payoff in self-defense. If what we want or think does not meet with a positive response, we can take it back, or claim – perhaps sincerely – that that’s not what we meant.

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

Both women and men could benefit from learning each other’s styles. Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy, and many men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.

To say that a person feels listened to means a lot more than just their ideas get heard. It’s a sign of respect. It makes people feel valued.