“I speak and speak, … but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. … It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

“Listen with ears of tolerance!
See through the eyes of compassion!
Speak with the language of love.”

“If listening was as important as speaking, you would have twice as many ears as mouths.”

“When I speak, you must not listen to the words, my dear. Listen to the Silence.”

“They speak to the ear. I want to speak to the memory.”

“We teach them to speak and also to listen. Because when people only talk and don't listen, they end up thinking that what they say is the only thing that is worth anything. … Speaking and listening to words is how we know who we are, where we come from, and where our steps are going. Also it's how we know about others, their steps, and their world. Speaking and listening to words is like listening to life.”

“And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent — the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was in my mouth.
Was I so utterly forsaken? Would no one speak the word I was in search of?”

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”

“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

“He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.”