p.13 The public conversation of the cultural group and the private thoughts of the members of the group form a continuous conversational web (Markova and Foppa, 1990).

p.19 There could be no discourse, no conversation at all, unless there were in place all sorts of practices in which certain reciprocal grantings of rights were immanent.

p.22 It is in language games that a form of life takes concrete form, that is in mainly interpersonal activities, frequently involving the use of material skills, in which language plays a variety of indispensable parts.

p.22 Heelan (1988) sees the life-world as derived from the everyday world of skilled practical and social action including conversation.

p.29 According to Vygotsky the main development moment is when a child has been trying to do something, and the task is completed by an adult supplying the missing step.

p.35 Cognition is possible only if the proliferation of conditions is either deliberately constrained as in the trial of O. J. Simpson, or implicitly constrained as in everyday encounters, for all practical purposes.

p.36 Real conversations are exceedingly complex phenomena... not only are the interchanges of interpersonal conversation the sites of much mental activity, but the general notion of a conversation is also a fruitful model with which to analyse, interpret and understand other human activities which are not overtly linguistic... The most obvious though not the only model that a discursive psychologist might take for a public and collective cognitive process would be conversation. A conversation consists of an exchange, in which the performances of each participant are relevant in so far as they are meaningful in terms of the particular conversation going forward.

p.37 It is a central insight of discursive psychology that we can usefully use conversation as a model or analogue for studying other complex forms of social interaction.

p.45 A useful model for skilled action, that is action that is intentional and normatively constrained, is conversation.

p.47 we cannot adequately describe a grammar without an account of the practices that go along with it. Wittgenstein insisted that speaking is at its most characteristic as a human activity as part of some practice or procedure. Words are more often used to instruct than they are used to describe. Each grammar with its associated practices makes available a different aspect of the indefinitely complex world we inhabit, either by highlighting it or by creating it, or sometimes both.

p.49 Once again we come upon the idea that mind is created by people ad hoc in the activities of everyday life, including private acts of thinking as well as public and collective cognitive performances. Mind is nothing but meaningful action... Actions are functional in practices, complex patterns of action through which tasks and projects are accomplished. Actions serve in this way only in so far as they are meaningful, that is accomplish acts.

p.50 Social life is not an ad hoc coming together of individuals, hazardously trading hypotheses as to what each one is thinking and doing. The minds of individuals are privatized practices condensing like fog out of the public conversation onto material nuclei, their bodies.

p.72 the cluster of person concepts that characterize discourses of self play the role of a grammar, the rules that make a discourse of persons possible. They are not the result of abstractions from experience. They are what make experience, as we have it, possible.

p.87 What then is the unifying principle of a personal conversation? The generic answer that has gradually come to the fore in the development of discursive psychology is the idea of the organizing narrative. A great deal of our time is taken up telling ourselves and others bits and pieces of autobiography, but not just as a single chronicle. Narratives follow story-lines and autobiographical narratives are no exception... McAdams uses the expression 'personal myth' to describe the unfolding story of my life that I tell myself and with which I manage many of the choices of my life... strange as it would seem, we are the stories we tell.

p.104 one must have a sense of a field of things centered on one's own embodied self with which one is in a material relation

p.133 Questionnaires are not instruments in these sense that thermometers are. They do not measure a property. They are invitations to a conversation. [JLJ - perhaps, if we use a questionnaire or checklist in our game-playing process, we are inviting a conversation with ourselves.]