Listeners Quotes

“The world is in sore need of good listeners. And in our own lives, it’s amazing to recognize just how valuable listening can be for us. How many mistakes have you made because you didn’t listen well? Personally, I’ve made many—and I’ve missed out on some wonderful opportunities because I was more interested in sharing what I had to say than I was in listening to what someone else had to say.”

“Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.”

“One of the most under-rated gifts we can give to others, is our undivided attention. Next time you spend time with a loved one, really listen to them and watch light up when they realize you are being completely attentive to them. There is so much to be learned and experienced when we can become great listeners!”

“Evere since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It wasn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the poem or the story itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers - to read as listeners - and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don;t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.”

“Good listeners, like precious gems, are to be treasured.”

“The best listeners are often those with the quietest heart.”

“This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.”

“Focus your attention on the quality of your words, and not the quantity, because few sensible talks attracts millions of listeners more than a thousand gibberish.”

“Tell them I came, and no one answered,That I kept my word," he said.Never the least stir made the listeners,Though every word he spakeFell echoing through the shadowiness of the still houseFrom the one man left awake:Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,And the sound of iron on stone,And how the silence surged softly backward,When the plunging hoofs were gone.”