William H. Gass Quotes

Communication always changes society, and society was always organized around communication channels. Two hundred years ago it was mostly rivers. It was sea-lanes and mountain passes. The Internet is another form of communication and commerce. And society organizes around the channels.

Words are the voice of the heart.

I think a healthy connection with the natural world actually makes us more human.

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

For me, speaking to anyone - on a stage, in an elevator - I am looking for impact and connection. The same goes for writing.

Go to where the silence is and say something.

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Great communication begins with connection.

Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.

I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets . . .

Humans tend to build walls when they should be opening doors.

Nuclear war would really set back cable.

The voice of the natural world would be, "Could you please give us space and leave us alone to get along with our own lives and our own ways, because we actually know much better how to do it then when you start interfering."

People often ask me questions that I cannot very well answer in words, and it makes me sad to think they are unable to hear the voice of my silence.

We are different. We are equal in every way but our voices are important to each other and our need to want to listen to each other and try to understand, because sometimes we are so difficult to understand. Men to understand us, and we to understand men. And we don't. We don't connect the way we should.

A river of words flowed between us.

The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.

The telephone gives us the happiness of being together yet safely apart.

The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labour, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right

You can give words, but you can't take them. And when words are given, that is when they are shared. We remember what that was like. Words so real they were almost tangible. There are conversations you remember, for certain. But more than that, there is the sensation of conversation. You will remember that, even when the precise words begin to blur.

Children are not only sensitive to silence, but also to a voice which calls them ... Out of that silence.

With time, people forget to say, "Darling I love you." just that word.

The truth is, rarely can a response make something better - what makes something better is connection.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.