We talk about things. We talk about nothing.

Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?

He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don't. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us.

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.

"I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.

But it's the same with all my friends, just fun and joking, nothing more. I can never bring myself to talk of anything outside the common round.

I'm constantly around people that talk a lot but say nothing. A sad case.

Just imagine the silence in the world, if people talked only what they knew

Most of them have gotten really good at saying absolutely nothing. They’ve all got some kind of program, but when you listen to them, you still don’t know what they’re talking about.

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything

Why can’t somebody give us a list of things everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of the things that everybody says but nobody thinks?