Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

A double bind is far worse than a straightforward damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. It requires you to obey two mutually exclusive commands: Anything you do to fulfill one violates the other.

Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book.

Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's.