One can’t stop and suddenly speak to a complete stranger, can one?......When it happens I could die of sadness. I feel somehow empty and drained....

I am not sure whether I altogether understand you. You make me curious. I don't much care about talking, but I should like to talk to you.

Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our midst is not robust. The “truth” about Amanda Knox or Jerry Sandusky or KSM is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility. How many of the crises and controversies I have described would have been prevented had we taken those lessons to heart?

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

Not to talk with people although they can be talked with is to waste people. To talk with people although they can't be talked with is to waste words. A man of understanding does not waste people, but he also does not waste words.

When a person should be spoken with, and you don't speak with them, you lose them. When a person shouldn't be spoken with and you speak to them, you waste your breath. The wise do not lose people, nor do they waste their breath.

You cannot talk to people successfully if they think you are not interested in what they have to say or you have no respect for them.

The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly it will crumple under our feet... The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.

If speaking pleases you, be silent! If silence pleases you, Speak!

You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.

We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. "If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process," Stanley Cavell has remarked, "that may be because speaking to someone does not seem mysterious enough."

Nobody speaks to me. People fall in love with me, and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me and — and all that sort of thing. But no one speaks to me. I sometimes think that no one can. Can you?

Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange, childish act of destruction in which nothing can be won. Like all withholding, it comes from a state of rage, and states of rage are products of the past. As some say, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” By refusing to talk without terms, a person is refusing to learn about themselves and thereby refusing to have a better life. It hurts everyone around them by dividing communities and inhibiting learning.

I do not find it easy to talk to people I don't know.