“If you talk to your friends the way your parents talk, they will think...” — Deborah Tannen Quote

If you talk to your friends the way your parents talk, they will think you are stiff and odd.

When women told me they'd always wished they had a sister, they were thinking of this ideal of mutual encouragement and support. Many of those who have sisters also yearn for this ideal because their relationships with their sisters don't always live up to it.

In this world, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus. They try to protect themselves from others' attempts to push them away.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.

Ed Miliband's anti-immigration stance is odd: it's hard to vote for a man who doesn't have the confidence to defend his own existence.

As a vicar's son, I understood performance. It never seemed odd to me that you'd stand up in front of people wearing weird clothes.

The first Nardwuar video I watched was, funnily enough, the first Odd Future one.

In my teens or twenties I wanted to do Blanche. Now I'm over that. Those roles are not attracting me now. Which is odd, because that's what most every actress would want to go do.