Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

My Grandmother was a Storyteller;
She knew her way around Words.
She never learned to read and write, but somehow
She knew the good of reading and writing;
She had learned how to Listen and Delight.
She had learned that in Words and in Language,
and there only,
She could have whole and consummate Being.
You see for Her, Words were Medicine.
They were Magic and Invisible.
They came from Nothing into Sound and Meaning.
They were beyond price.
They could neither be bought nor sold, and
She never threw Words away.
She told me Stories and
She taught me how to Listen.
I was a Child, and I Listened.

"What was that?" said Grandmamma, who is not really deaf, but when in a tight place likes to gain time by this harmless imposition.

“Er, will your grandmother tell that fib for you?”
“I guess so. Yes, I'm sure she will. She says people have to tell little white fibs or else people couldn’t stand each other. But she says fibs were meant to be used, not abused.”
“She sounds like a sensible person.”

Auntie Yang is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.

Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices. Desperately trying to make the horrific sound mundane.

She was not listening. If she listened she would have to hear uncomfortable truths.

Always ding dinging Dame Grundy into my ears - What will Mrs. Grundy say? What will Mrs. Grundy think?

To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.

As a 10-year-old girl, I would listen to my grandmother discuss issues, and she made a lasting impression on me.

...the biggest challenge I had was to convince people that I wanted to listen to whatever they said. One lady said, "You mean you want me to talk?"

After a while he stopped listening. His ears took in only the rise and fall of her voice, the elaborate, familiar, endless rhythm of it; but from long experience he was able to say "Oh yes" or "Of course," in all the right places.

"The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it 'nonsense' if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!

Miss Bulstrode had another faculty which demonstrated her superiority over most other women. She could listen.