Less Talking Quotes

1. "Trains are relentless things, aren't they, Monsieur Poirot? People are murdered and die, but they go on just the same. I am talking nonsense, but you know what I mean.""Yes, yes, I know. Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on. And it is a good thing that that is so.""Why?""Because the train gets to its journey's end at last, and there is a proverb about that in your language, Mademoiselle.""'Journey's end in lovers meeting.'" Lenox laughed. "That is not going to be true for me.""Yes--yes, it is true. You are young, younger than you yourself know. Trust the train, Mademoiselle, for it is le bon Dieu who drives it."The whistle of the engine came again."Trust the train, Mademoiselle," murmured Poirot again. "And trust Hercule Poirot. He knows."
Author: Agatha Christie

2. "If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth."
Author: Alan Patrick Herbert

3. "Athen's father taught him to never bare your weapon unless you planned on using it. Drawing steel prematurely negated any chance of avoiding conflict. Master Kallen, one of Athen's gruff sword trainers, held a similar belief, though embellished with the poetic grace of a retired soldier. Drawing your sword during the verbal parrying preceding combat was tantamount to telling your opponent to go fuck his mother. At that point the time for talking your way out of the situation stands as much chance of surviving as a snowflake shoved up a fire drake's ass."
Author: Artemas Khan

4. "The costumes help. They make it less real, disguise what it really is both for the actors and for the people who'll see it on the screen. It's like the people who read Anna Karenina, and because it's in Russia they can say, 'Oh, that's not my pain they're talking about.' And Chris is tough. She goes from one thing to the next and doesn't worry about the past. When a cat sits mere purring on your lap, you know for a fact she isn't thinking about her former owner; she's thinking about her dinner. That's Chris."
Author: Barbara Hambly

5. "Dread of returning to Iraq equals the direst poverty, and that's how he feels right now, poor, like a shabby homeless kid suddenly thrust into the company of millionaires. Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars. This is what he truly envies of these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point, and at this moment he feels so sorry for himself that he could break right down and cry."
Author: Ben Fountain

6. "The musical is amazing. i mean,i don't throw around that word very often unless im talking about myself. Being humble is one of my many fine qualities.IGN Interview May 2009"
Author: Billie Joe Armstrong

7. "Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean."
Author: Brad Thor

8. "I'm kind of looking for something with a lot less action and more talking and listening."
Author: Brandon Routh

9. "How I love them. How good they are. They endure endless hours of me talking about the future. They keep me near and at the same time bid me farewell. That is what real love is."
Author: Carole Maso

10. "I looked deeply into the fire, and the timeless, eternal dance of colors I saw there was so beautiful, I wanted to cry. Cal's deep voice floated toward me as clearly as a whisper in a tunnel, as if his words were meant for me alone, and the found me unerringly even as the group dissolved into talking. He said the words under his breath, his gaze fixed on my face. "I banish loneliness."
Author: Cate Tiernan

11. "Life was long, unless you died, and he didn't intend to spend the next sixty years talking about the last twenty-two."
Author: Chad Harbach

12. "By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George — though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is what they are talking to. But, of course, they never could—its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect."
Author: Christopher Isherwood

13. "Neither was in love with a young man unless he was she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, talking to one another. The amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months..."
Author: D.H. Lawrence

14. "You get to a point where the factual adjudication doesn't matter because there are all these other outlets that are far less responsible, all talking about the ad, some of which have a political reason for promoting it."
Author: David Brock

15. "John and I have made this stuff our hobby, in the way that an especially attractive prisoner makes a hobby out of not getting raped. Jesus, that's a terrible analogy. I apologize. What I'm saying is that it's self-preservation. We didn't choose this, we just have talents that makes us the equivalent of that new guy in the cell block who has a slim, hairless body and kind of looks like a woman from behind, and has an incredibly realistic tattoo of boobs on his back. He may have no desire at all to ever even touch a penis, but it's going to happen, even if it's just in the process of frantically slapping them away. Jesus, am I still talking about this? [John—please delete the above paragraph before it goes off to the publisher]."
Author: David Wong

16. "I'm thinking we ought to rethink the whole self-esteem thing. It should almost be a dirty word. I mean, look at Kayla. She has the intelligence of a tree stump, and its sense of humour. She's less about real attractiveness than she is about advertising... She's the kind of girl who shows how hot she is because she has nothing else to offer, who doesn't realise that hotness has an expiration date. Yet, I'm still a little nervous talking to her like she's holding a lottery ticket she just might or might not decide to hand over to me. It is nuts, if you stop to think about it. I give give her this power, and it's kind of like voting some idiot into office. But hey, we're good at that, too."
Author: Deb Caletti

17. "Hey, I write fiction. I just make this stuff up, unless I get my hands on some good juicy truth. You know the kind I'm talking about ... that stranger-than variety."
Author: Dick Peterson

18. "As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing."
Author: Francois De La Rochefoucauld

19. "I've sequenced the questions for maximum speed of elimination,' I explained. ‘I believe I can eliminate most women in less than forty seconds. Then you can choose the topic of discussion for the remaining time.' ‘But then it won't matter,' said Frances. ‘I'll have been eliminated.' ‘Only as a potential partner. We may still be able to have an interesting discussion.' ‘But I'll have been eliminated.' I nodded. ‘Do you smoke?' ‘Occasionally,' she said. I put the questionnaire away. ‘Excellent.' I was pleased that my question sequencing was working so well. We could have wasted time talking about ice-cream flavours and make-up only to find that she smoked. Needless to say, smoking was not negotiable. ‘No more questions. What would you like to discuss?"
Author: Graeme Simsion

20. "Sumire was a hopeless romantic, a bit set in her ways - innocent of the ways of the world, to put a nice spin on it. Start her talking and she'd go on nonstop, but if she was with someone she didn't get along with - most people in the world, in other words - she barely opened her mouth. She smoked too much, and you could count on her to lose her ticket every time she took the train. She'd get so engrossed in her thoughts at times she'd forget to eat, and she was as thin as one of those war orphans in an old Italian film - like a stick with eyes. I'd love to show you a photo of her but I don't have any. She hated having her photograph taken - no desire to leave behind for posterity a Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man."
Author: Haruki Murakami

21. "Kumiko and I would visit their home and have dinner with them twice a month with mechanical regularity. This was a truly loathsome experience, situated at the precise midpoint between a meaningless mortification of the flesh and brutal torture. Throughout the meal, I had the sense that their dining room table was as long as a railway station. They would be eating and talking about something way down at the other end, and I was too far away for them to see. This went on for a year, until Kumiko's father and I had a violent argument, after which we never saw each other again. The relief this gave me bordered on ecstasy. Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion."
Author: Haruki Murakami

22. "[G]randma was always afraid of something. She set aside time each day for dread. And not nameless dread. She was quite specific about the various tragedies stalking her. She feared pneumonia, muggers, riptides, meteors, drunk drivers, drug addicts, serial killers, tornadoes, doctors, unscrupulous grocery clerks, and the Russians. The depth of Grandma's dread came home to me when she bought a lottery ticket and sat before the tv as the numbers were called. After her first three numbers were a match, she began praying feverishly that she wouldn't have the next three. She dreaded winning, for fear that her heart would give out."
Author: J.R. Moehringer

23. "Because - Bobby Lewis said this once to us in class, the better you get, the less credit you'll get. Because the better you are, the more it looks like walking and talking and everybody thinks they can walk and talk."
Author: James Lipton

24. "I was breathless, talking as fast as I could. I was afraid if I stopped talking, even for a second, I'd start sobbing again."Whoa, there." Fang smiled and reached up, tracing a hand down the side of my face, winding strands of my hair around his fingers. "Stop talking and let me just tell you how great it is to wake up staring at your face. Okay?"
Author: James Patterson

25. "There was a long pause. "you know," he went on, "I sometimes think mankind is dangerously arrogant. We do a few sums, and then claim we have the universe off pat. we measure the spaces between the stars, and declare them empty. We set a limit on infinity. We are like the occupants of a closed room; having worked out everything within the range of our knowledge, we announce that the room and its contents are all that exists. Nothing beyond. Nothing unseen or unknown, incalculable or neffable. This is it. And then every so often God lifts the veil—twitches the curtain—and gives us a glimpse, just a glimpse, of something more. As if He wishes to show us how narrow is our vision, how meaningless the boundaries we have set for ourselves. I felt that when Fern was talking. Just for a minute I though: This is truth, there's a world beyond all the jargon of unbelief."
Author: Jan Siegel

26. "I want to spend less time talking about myself, and more time listening to what other people have to say about me."
Author: Jarod Kintz

27. "When one photographer edged too close to the wolves, tirelessly dogging McIntyre for the best place to perch his bazooka-size lens I could see daggers in the eyes of the vvolunteers. But McIntyre was welcoming. Some individuals, her told me, could move freely about the valley; others were ruthlessly punished, chased off, or worse. He was talking about wolves."
Author: Joe Roman

28. "And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

29. "I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits...."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

30. "Mothers who know do less. They permit less of what will not bear good fruit eternally. They allow less media in their homes, less distraction, less activity that draws their children away from their home. Mothers who know are willing to live on less and consume less of the world's goods in order to spend more time with their children—more time eating together, more time working together, more time reading together, more time talking, laughing, singing, and exemplifying. These mothers choose carefully and do not try to choose it all."
Author: Julie B. Beck

31. "What kind of world have we built when it is more acceptable to ask for sex than a cuddle session? … Have we so stripped our sexuality of inherent value that it becomes the sacrificial lamb on the altar of connection, because everything else is too precious to risk? I'm the first one to say that my body is an amusement park, and I like to have fun with it – and let other people ride it – but there is still a divinity in it. It is no less precious than our fears, our smiles, our hopes, our tears. And this goes not just for women, but for all people. I've known men and dominants who felt they could be vulnerable only during sex, and so they would ask for that instead of talking about what was bothering them, or even simply as a distraction from their own thoughts and troubles."
Author: Kacie Cunningham

32. "...what it had indexed to was only an idea of a place, an abstraction formed from memories too brief and passing to account for the small effects of time: wind scouring and lifting the dust of the plains of Nineveh in immeasurable increments, the tuck of a river farther into its bend, hour by hour, year by year; the map would become less and less a picture of fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions. It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow."
Author: Kevin Powers

33. "Being a mum makes you more aware of how short life is and how important it is to enjoy every minute because you have less time for yourself. A day doesn't have 24 hours any more - it only lasts 10, or eight. So you learn to get rid of all the parasites. I'm not talking about people, but things that could be toxic for happiness."
Author: Ludivine Sagnier

34. "He ordered Ronan to put on some terrible music--Ronan was always too happy to oblige in this department--and then he abused the Camaro at every stoplight on the way out of town. "Put your back into it!" Gansey shouted breathlessly. He was talking to himself, of course, or to the gearbox. "Don't let it smell fear on you!" Blue wailed each time the engine revved up, but not unhappily. Noah played the drums on the back of Ronan's headrest. Adam, for his part, was not wild, but he did his best not to appear unwild, so as not to ruin it for the others."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

35. "In 2008, America elected a man with no "hands-on experience" of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of doing than any previous administration in American history. You want "change," so you vote for a bunch of guys who've never done nuthin' but sit around talking?"
Author: Mark Steyn

36. "I looked at her; I saw a slipshod permanet crumpling her hair into a shapeless mass of curls; I saw a brown overcoat, pitifully threadbare and a bit too shot; I saw a face both unobtrusively attractive and attractively unobtrusive; I sensed in this young woman tranquillity, simplicity and modesty, and I felt that these were qualities I needed; moreover, it seemed to me that we were very much akin: all I had to do was to go up and start talking to her and she would smile as if a long-lost brother had suddenly appeared before her."
Author: Milan Kundera

37. "For crissakes, you're the frickin' poster boy for DarkRiver with your 'Gee, shucks, I'm harmless' act."Dorian was used to being ribbed about his looks. With his blond hair and blue eyes, he looked more like a surfer hanging out for the right wave than blooded DarkRiver sentinel."Look who's talking, Miss Bikini Babe 2067."
Author: Nalini Singh

38. "I'm not blessed, or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abbatoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them."
Author: Neil Gaiman

39. "Scientists now know the brain receives 400 billion bits of information each second. To give you some idea of just how much information that is, consider this: It would take nearly 600,000 average-size books just to print 400 billion zeros. Needless to say, that's a heck of a lot of reality. So what do we do? We start screening. We start narrowing down. I'll take that bit of information over there, and let's see—this one fits nicely with my ongoing soap opera about the opposite sex. When all is said and done, we're down to 2,000 measly bits of information. Go ahead and take a bow, because even that's pretty impressive. We're talking 2,000 bits of information each and every second. But here's the problem. What we choose to take in is only one-half of one-millionth of a percent of what's out there."
Author: Pam Grout

40. "Wetikos can psychopathically (and thus toxically) mimic the human personality perfectly. If it serves their agenda, they can be convincing beyond belief, making themselves out to be normal, caring, politically correct human beings. They can endlessly talking about taking responsibility, but they never genuinely face up to and become accountable for their actions. They are unable to genuinely mourn, being only concerned with themselves. They will feign grief, however, just as they will try to appear compassionate, if it is politically expedient to do so and, hence, to their advance, they are master manipulators."
Author: Paul Levy

41. "Jacque leaned over and whispered in Sally's ear, "I give it two days before he lays one on her.""You're being generous. I say less than twenty four hours.""Is that a bet?" Jacque asked, eyebrows raised."Better believe it," Sally answered. Her lips eased into a crooked smile.Jen leaned around Sally and glared at her two best friends. "What are you two betting on?""Good grief. What, does she have eagle ears or something?""No, you dork. Your whisper is just you talking in normal volume but making your voice raspy. Really, you sound more like a chick who's been smoking for thirty years."Jen shrugged. "I'm just throwing that out there. You can take it and apply it at your leisure."Fane was chuckling at Jen's words when Jacque elbowed him, causing him to cough."You don't get to laugh, wolf-man."Jacque turned back to Jen. "Thank you for that observation, Sherlock.""Always glad to help a friend in need, Watson." Jen grinned at Jacque's irritated look."
Author: Quinn Loftis

42. "I caught Faraday's face between my hands and broke off the kiss, breathless. "I've just thought of something," I said."Something we haven't tried.""There's a lot of things we haven't tried," he said, "but I'm going to refrain from the obvious, and assume you're talking about the wormhole. What is it?"
Author: R.J. Anderson

43. "Many of the prophets of Jesus's time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time."
Author: Reza Aslan

44. "Now you've said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that's all we ever talked about. We'd sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,' though; that's where we'd chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that's when there's nothing to do but take off. If you can"
Author: Richard Yates

45. "Any eyes on me - a late-night street sweeper, some dude texting in his parked car, the homeless guy talking to himself - make me feel uncomfortable when I skate. Everyone expects me to do certain things."
Author: Rodney Mullen

46. "Sleepless nights, infinite random thoughts, Remembering those moments, he had much to say, an urge to talk to someone, to be cared, to be loved, to be understood !! She was gone by now, And he was lost !! There it was, A white paper note, a pen, and the dark clouds forcing him to spill out !! Yes Words did most of talking, the unsaid words took the paper form .. Strange it was, the way Love was lost somewhere in the Library stacks !!"
Author: Self

47. "Big Daddy: What makes you so restless, have you got ants in your britches?Brick: Yes, sir...Big Daddy: Why?Brick: - Something - Hasn't - Happened...Big Daddy: Yeah? What is that?Brick [sadly]: - the click...Big Daddy: Did you say the click?Brick: Yes, click.Big Daddy: What click?Brick: A click that I get in my head that makes me peacefulBig Daddy: I sure in hell don't know what you're talking about, but it disturbs me.Brick: It's just a mechanical thing.Big Daddy: What is a mechanical thing?Brick: This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful. I got to drink till I get it."
Author: Tennessee Williams

48. "How could Reagan live in a WhiteHouse, which has a lot of rooms,and there be homelessness? And he's talking about helping. I don't believe that there is anyone that is going hungry in America simply by reason of denial or lack of ability to feed them. It is by people not knowing where or how to get this help. Why can't he take people off the street and put them in his White House? Then he'll have people from the streets to help him with his ideas. Not helpless! Homeless! Not helpless They haven't been homeless forever.They've done things in society.The White House would be tainted because he doesn't want to get dirty."
Author: Tupac Shakur

49. "There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

50. "The glass room above the Pit is full of Dauntless, some of them walking the ropes above our heads, some talking and laughing in groups."
Author: Veronica Roth

Less Talking Quotes Pictures