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" Our ways of relating to each other become like habits. "

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" In a world of status, independence is key, because a primary means of establishing status is to tell others what to do, and taking orders is a marker of low status. Though all humans 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. "

" The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come. "

" One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!' "

" All of us aspire to be powerful, and we all want to connect with others. "

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

" When evidence emerged that Clinton was a devoted mother, Margaret Carlson writing in 'TIME' found her guilty of 'yuppie overdoting on her daughter.' "

" Conflict can't be avoided in our public lives any more than we can avoid conflict with people we love. One of the great strengths of our society is that we can express these conflicts openly. "

" New Yorkers seem to think the best thing two people can do is talk. "

" There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns. "

" For many women, and a fair number of men, saying 'I'm sorry' isn't literally an apology; it's a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation. "

" It's a particularly modern myth that married people are best friends. The best-friend concept is a uniquely female phenomena. "

" The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words. "

" Asian cultures... place great value on avoiding open expression of disagreement and conflict because they emphasize harmony. "

" Conversations with sisters can spark extremes of anger or extremes of love. Everything said between sisters carries meaning not only from what was just said but from all the conversations that came before - and 'before' can span a lifetime. The layers of meaning combine profound connection with equally profound competition. "

" The political Right is particularly vehement when it comes to compromise. Conservatives are now strongly swayed by the Tea Party movement, whose clarion call is a refusal to compromise regardless of the practical consequences. "

" The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate. "

" Now I am married to a man who is a partner and friend. We come from similar backgrounds and share values and interests. It is a continual source of pleasure to talk to him. "

" I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. For part of my life, I was living in Detroit, and I remember a friend of mine commenting she could always tell when I had been speaking to my mother because my New York accent had come back. "

" For each other, at each other: Sisters can be either or both. The same could be said of people in any close relationship. Yet there is something special about sisters - specially gratifying and specially fraught. "

" Everything you say in a family carries meaning from all that was said before. So with friends, there is less likelihood of a few words triggering associations from childhood, where our deepest emotions often are rooted. "

" An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what's perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter's gender. "

" Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different. "

" I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always. "

" It might seem at first surprising that when I studied women and men talking at work, I found that women 'interrupted' each other more often than men did - when they were in all-women conversations. "

" We tend to assume that we have a baseline of speech that's going to be normal in all contexts, but the truth is, we all change our ways of speaking depending on who we're talking to. And so I think it's kind of a gesture of politeness to the people you're speaking to to try to say something in their own idiom. "

" If you understand gender differences in what I call 'conversational style', you may not be able to prevent disagreements from arising, but you stand a better chance of preventing them from spiraling out of control. "

" Sisters, to me, are fascinating because it is a unique connection of the coming together of connection and competition. The fact that you have these age differences is a built-in power struggle, and the fact that you're all trying to get attention and resources from the same parents creates competition. "

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

" The word 'sister' evokes an ideal of connection and support, like the friendships that made Rebecca Wells's 'Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood' and Ann Brashares's 'The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' into best-selling novels and successful films. "

" There's the bond of a connection and the bond of bondage... When you are connected to somebody, everything each one does affects the other, and it's a kind of bondage. You're not as free as you would be if that person wasn't in your life. "