Deborah Tannen

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

When you feel that the people you are dealing with day to day don't have manners, it gives you the feeling that the world is somehow coming apart. It makes you feel that everything is out of control.
-Deborah Tannen

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.
-Deborah Tannen

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.
-Deborah Tannen

Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.
-Deborah Tannen

Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's.
-Deborah Tannen

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

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

It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.
-Deborah Tannen