A Quote by Laurence Sterne

Conversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixtyou,--the trade drops at once: and this is the reasonwhy travellers have so little [good] conversation with natives,--owing to their [the natives'] suspicionthat there is nothing to be extracted from the conversationworth the trouble of their bad language.
The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck.
On the night of the 1st of September we observed for the first time signs of the natives being in the neighbourhood. Fires were seen on the low land near Cape Frederick Henry, and at daylight we saw the natives with our glasses.
It's hard these days to have a conversation, at least it is for me, about [Truman]Capote without "Good Night, and Good Luck" coming up in the same conversation.
Conversation is our account of ourselves...Conversation is the vent of character as well as thoughts...It is the laboratory of the student.
My dad is a minister, and my mum is a worker with the less fortunate and the disabled. They're Nigerian natives. Their first language is Yoruba, and their second language is English.
But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they enjoy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.
There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.
This conversation with the audience has been going on since, what, '72, '73... Sometimes it's like a conversation after dinner with friends. You're in a restaurant, and you got there at 8 o'clock. Suddenly, you realize it's midnight. Where did the time go? You're enjoying the conversation. It's sort of a natural, organic conversation.
Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty.
When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.He becomes a sort of hollow,posing dummy,the conventional figure of a sahib.For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives",and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him.He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.
Many years ago, a large American shoe company sent two sales reps to different parts of the Australian outback. A while later, the company received a telegram from each. The first said, 'No business here - the natives don't wear shoes.' The second said, 'Great opportunity here - the natives don't wear shoes.'
There's a deeper conversation to be had on guns, and just because I happen to know where I fall into that conversation doesn't mean that I don't want to have that conversation.
It is, I think, a good deal owing to the preponderance of the commercial element in Society that conversation has sunk to its present dull level of conventional chatter.
The Italian character in general is full of animation, and the natives enter into the interests and welfare of the stranger before them with a fervor that forbids all doubt of its sincerity and that is truly surprising.
I'm a constant idiot in conversation - I always seem to sound either smug or stupid. Writing plays was a way of winning the conversation by controlling the conversation.
Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.
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