56 Quotes About Small-talk

How do you small-talk your father when "dad" is a language so foreign that whenever you try to say it, it feels like you got a third lip and a second tongue?

All too often the compliment we have just been paid is merely a repayment for the compliment we have just paid.

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

If you chose Option 2 [confrontation], you did well. People will be less likely to engage you in office small talk of any kind, but that's likely a benefit when you consider the fact that every ten minutes of office small talk takes one year off of your life.

Just contemplating the energy required to make small talk tired him.

I had a roll of non sequiturs in my pockets and I was just tossing them out across the water trying to get a good skip going.

[He] looked troubled, for he had strayed too far from small talk right to the center of things--it happened more and more these days--and now must try to return to the things that didn't matter.

Small talk is for small people. Conversations are for the elite.

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.