One of the problems of social life is to know what to say to one another when we meet; every man and woman's desire is to appear sympathetic and clever, and this makes conversation difficult, because, taking us all round, we are neither sympathetic nor clever.

how can we have a real conversation if every time we speak i can see in your eyes that my words are not reaching you? they stop at a narrative you have created about me based on who i was many years ago.

Communication, hardest thing in the world. Y'know, I can look at you guys, I can communicate to you all night, but, one-on-one, I'm terrible. It's just, there's certain things about communicating that really bother me. Like whenever I meet somebody new I say, "Hi! How are you!" Most of the time when people hear that they'll say, "Good! And yourself?", or "Fine! Thank you very much!" But sometimes they like to surprise you, "I've got no dream, man! I'm all dead inside!"

It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.

...in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I'll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight — 'I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore' — which evidently makes me look either as if I'm very rude and abrupt or as if I'm semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully...I've actually lost friends this way.

It actually is difficult but the truth is, once you set boundaries and you can establish what you want and do not want, people would respect them.

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

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

Running from difficult conversations and uncomfortable truths blocks you from having deep, meaningful connections with others.

To express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself — that, my friend, is very hard to do.

But, you have to know how to share, open up, and be vulnerable. This ‘not knowing how’ is one of the reasons people find it difficult to begin or maintain relationships, and it makes absolute sense.

Seemingly impossible conversations typically have one thing in common: they're about moral beliefs rooted in one's sense of identity, but they play out on the level of facts (or assertions, name-calling, grandstanding, threats, etc.). [...] The most difficult conversations, then, masquerade as discussions about something other than morality, but they are actually about what qualities, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors individuals believe make them good people or bad people and why it is important to hold the right views among those.

Seemingly impossible conversations typically have one thing in common: they're about moral beliefs rooted in one's sense of identity, but they play out on the level of facts (or assertions, name-calling, grandstanding, threats, etc.). [...] The most difficult conversations, then, masquerade as discussions about something other than morality, but they are actually about what qualities, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors individuals believe make them good people or bad people and why it is important to hold the right views among those.

There are moments when we are incapable of exchanging a single word with anybody…it’s beyond us…