Quotes About Misunderstanding

The conviction that we know others better than they know us - and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa) - leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger's behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands. So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency? You get Sandra Bland. 1

The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged

But with strangers, we're intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations.

The Consul stood up. He gave two short whistles while below him the cat's ears twirled. "She thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it," he added.

Some people are just like snake, they will never understand your love.

Not everyone understand everything.

Jesus made me, so he should save me from pity, sympathy and idiots discussing me.

She left me, offended at my want of sympathy, and thinking, no doubt, that I envied her. I did not - at least, I firmly believed I did not.

The world is divided into those who understand me and those who don't. In the case of the latter, I simply leave them to torment themselves trying to gain my sympathy.

The teachers thought there was something wrong with me because I wouldn't talk to other kids. I was almost playing mind games with them.

My son's an idiot. His teacher asked him to spell Mississippi. He asked which one? The river or the state?

Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.

The only thing that surprises me is the characterization of teachers as lazy and greedy. Only someone with very little understanding of what teaching requires would say such a thing.

The great myth of our times is that technology is communication.

He always imagined that silence was somehow directed against him. Or that it was his fault.

just to break the silence. He always imagined that silence was somehow directed against him. Or that it was his fault.

It is such a pretty story, told to me by a Cuban woman I met in a bar at the beach. She left the bar before I did; a drunken man took her place. He leaned into me and said, I see in your dark eyes that you have suffered, and you have compassion, and I have suffered, and I have compassion, and I see in your eyes that I can say things to you-- My eyes are blue, I said.

I always got the words pedestrian and Presbyterian confused. I didn't understand why Presbyterians always had the right of way.

They don't see what they're doing. The only thing they see are their intentions.

we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more.

In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English.