Deborah Tannen Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence.

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

Deborah Tannen
We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

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

Deborah Tannen
Though all human beings need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions.

Deborah Tannen
Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.

Deborah Tannen
The chivalrous man who holds a door open or signals a woman to go ahead of him when he's driving is negotiating both status and connection.

Deborah Tannen
The argument culture urges us to approach the world-and the people in it-in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition over-weighted.

Deborah Tannen
Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.

Deborah Tannen
The desire for freedom and independence becomes more of an issue for many men in relationships, whereas interdependence and connection become more of an issue for many women.

Deborah Tannen
Many women feel it is natural to consult with their partners at every turn, while many men automatically make more decisions without consulting their partners.

Deborah Tannen
The one who decides who goes ahead has the upper hand, regardless of who gets to go. This is why many women do not feel empowered by such privileges as having doors held open for them. The advantage of going first through the door is less salient to them than the disadvantage of being granted the right to walk through a door by someone who is framed, by his magnanimous gesture, as the arbiter of the right-of-way.

Deborah Tannen
The allure of love is to have someone who knows you so well that you don't have to explain yourself. It is the promise of someone who cares enough about you to protect you against the world of strangers who do not wish you well.

Deborah Tannen
All conversation, in addition to whatever else it does, displays, and asks for recognition of, our competence.

Deborah Tannen
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
Public discourse requires making an argument for a point of view, not having an argument — as in having a fight.

Deborah Tannen
Any criticism heard secondhand sounds worse than it would face to face. Words spoken out of our presence strike us as more powerful, just as people we know only by reputation seem larger than life.

Deborah Tannen
When those closest to us respond to events differently than we do, when they seem to see the same scene as part of a different play, when they say things that we could not imagine saying in the same circumstances, the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing is suddenly unsure.

Deborah Tannen
In dialogue, there is opposition, yes, but no head-on collision. Smashing heads does not open minds.

Deborah Tannen
Cooperation isn't the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict.

Deborah Tannen
In an ongoing relationship, each current criticism packs the punches of all the others that have gone before.

Deborah Tannen
Words can be like weapons of destruction: It takes so much effort, and the cooperation of so many people, to build something — and so little effort of so few to tear it down.

Deborah Tannen
All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female — all result in different ways of talking.

Deborah Tannen