The talker has found a hearer but not a listener; and though he may talk his very best for his own sake, you will find that his mental movements are erratic: they have no fixed centre and no definite object. His talk is like the water of a canal whose banks have given way, which rolls aimlessly hither and thither, without fulfilling any useful function, though it is the same water which was so helpful and serviceable, when it was confined within clearly marked limits by the restraining force of its earthy boundaries.
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
Maybe more than a teller, I am a story listener. I really enjoy listening to stories. I remember them and keep them in my mind. All of my films are a collection of small stories that have been told to me.
Their [the evangelicals'] success also points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause... They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them.
During the course of my presidency crime has been the lowest it's been probably since the '60s. Butyou wouldn't know it if you were watching TV or looking at the internet, and you certainly wouldn't know it, listening to this past [Donald Trump's] campaign.
Awakening to the truth is a deep realization of what you are as an experience. What is it that is listening? What is it that is feeling? Feel it. Sense it. Welcome it.
Catherine [...] enjoyed her usual happiness with Henry Tilney, listening with sparkling eyes to everything he said; and, in finding him irresistible, becoming so herself.
The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
Of all bad listeners, the worst and most terrible to encounter is the man who is so fond of listening that he wishes to hear, not only your conversation, but that of every other person in the room.
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.