We have had a chance to travel to all 56 counties in this state, and I have had the chance to sit around with cups of coffee and having conversations about what matters to Montanans.

Technology is a double-edged sword for sure. You can use it to get in touch with somebody, to get to know somebody, to have really meaningful conversations, or you can use it to hurt and bully people.

When it comes to having conversations with girls what I hear from them is that there is a lot of pressure to look a certain way, act a certain way, perform a certain way, and there are very mixed messages. We are telling them, 'Be yourself, be true to who you are,' but what does that mean in a society of comparison, competition, and individualism?

When I was a kid, we'd go to the movies, and my parents would reach out to everyone around us in the theater, most of whom could barely afford the movie ticket. They'd hand out popcorn and Milk Duds, strike up conversations with them, lend shoulders to cry on, learn their names, and smile at everyone.

I'm the only one in my family who is deaf, and there are still conversations that go around me that I miss out on. And I ask what's going on, and I have to ask to be included. But I'm not going to be sad about it. I don't live in sad isolation. It's just a situation I'm used to.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

What will support any relationship is clear, complete and conscious conversations when upsets or breakdowns occur.

I believe it matters how you treat people. I believe in Heaven. I don't believe that this is it, and then we're done. I have a lovely relationship with God, although when I've lost someone or I've seen a sick child, I've had conversations with Him in which I've had to ask, 'How can that be right?'

My mother was a personal friend of God's. They had ongoing conversations.

It is irresponsible and shows a lack of integrity for anyone to disclose medical information regardless of how it was gathered. I would expect that conversations regarding my drug testing history during the course of my medical treatment would be private.

Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.

Particularly black Americans, many of them, from that I have seen and conversations I've had, are sort of insulted that the civil rights movement is being hijacked - the rhetoric of the civil rights movement is being hijacked for something like same sex marriage. Black Americans tend to have a higher degree of religiosity.

My grandfather, or Nana Ji, as we called him, was a family legend. Amarnath Vidyalankar spent his life fighting for India's independence, which included spending four years in prison in Mahatma Gandhi's movement. I still remember the conversations we had together, many of them while playing chess.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

Humor can prove to be the conversational lubricant you need to remove the tension from the most unpleasant management- and accountability-related conversations.

Together with open conversations and greater understanding, we can ensure that attitudes for mental health change and children receive the support they deserve.

As we all know, mental health matters, while we still have a long way to go, we're starting to see the wheels turning for real and meaningful change. As a parent of young boys, the fact these conversations will be happening at home, in their friendship groups and in the classroom is so important.

Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.

'Savage Inequalities' was about school finance, and 'Amazing Grace' primarily dealt with medical and social injustices in New York. But with 'Ordinary Resurrections,' I had no predetermined agenda. When I met with the children, I was not in pursuit of any line of thinking. In our conversations, I let them lead me where they wanted to go.

Some of the most important conversations I've ever had occurred at my family's dinner table.

We've come quite far with the idea of equality between sexes, but there's still a lot of conversations that need to be had about men in power.

I encourage people to have those tough conversations just to educate yourself on what goes on and how we can create equality in the world and grow together as one.

The main purpose of engaging in conversation can no longer be personal advancement or respectability. Instead, I'd like for us to use conversations to create equality, to open ourselves to strangers, and, most practically, to remake our working world.