Quotes About Misunderstanding

This is a 911? You know you only text that when someone is dead or dying. You scared the crap out of me.

Odd how it was so easy for a stranger to assume such familiarity. Especially when those who were supposed to know you best often didn't, not at all.

Oh, God, I said. No, it's Dexter, he replied, offering me his hand, which I ignored. He glanced behind him, then back at me. I'll see you soon, he said, and grinned at me. Like hell, I replied

This was always the problem with my mother and me, I suddenly realized. There were so many things we thought we agreed on, but anythign can have two meanings. Like sides of a coin, it just matters how it falls.

Not for the first time, I wished both of us could just say what we meant. But that, like so much else, was impossible

As far as I was concerned, we'd come to a draw: I hadn't wanted to come, and she didn't want me to leave. We were even. But I knew my mother wouldn't see it that way. Lately, we didn't seem to see anything the same.

It hadn't even occured to me that somebody would believe mine.

Like so many before them, they didn't care that my dad was only the messenger. They still wanted to shoot him.

Everyone else could get through to my mother: all they had to do was dial a number and wait for her to pick up. If only, I thought, it was that easy for me.

Peor que los gritos? ?Mucho peor ?dijo, asintiendo con la cabeza?. Mira, en una discusión, al menos, sabes qué es lo que está pasando. O tienes una idea. El silencio es... Puede ser cualquier cosa. Es tan... ?Tan ensordecedor... ?terminé por él [...]. ?Exactamente.

what isn't said can hurt the most.

I was distracted, thinking about what she'd said, until she got to this last part. Sherman? I said. She nodded. That's John and Craig's friend. He's visiting from Shreveport. Sherman from Shreveport? I said. This is the guy you're determined I go out with? You can't judge a book by its cover! she snapped. When I slid my eyes toward Forbidden , she grabbed it up, shoving it back under the bed. You know what I mean. Sherman might be very nice.

Odd how it was so easy for a stranger to assume such familiarity. Especially when those who were supposed to know you best often didn't, not at all.

When people first heard this, or saw me and remembered it, they always made that face. The one with the sad look, accompanied by the cock of the head to the side and the softening of the chin—oh my goodness, you poor thing. While it was usually well intentioned, to me it was just a reaction of muscles and tendons that meant nothing. Nothing at all. I hated that face. I saw it everywhere.

But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren't what people wanted to hear.

You know," he said after a moment, "it's a shame you feel that way. Because I think he likes you." I just looked at him. "Did you not hear him tell me I was fat the other day?" "He didn't say you were fat," Nate replied. "He said you looked a little rotund." "How is that different?

I think we — well, I — messed up the story.

After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us.

What's a ree-tard?" I asked Bernadette when I to back upstairs. "In music it's pronounced rih-tard, short for the Italian ritardando, which means slowing down," she said. 'What does it mean when it's pronounced ree-tard and somebody says it about you in English?" I asked. "It usually means the person saying it is a dimwit." (27-28)

When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.

Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

Would never understand what women want. What do they want? They breath salad and drink human blood.

am accustomed to being downgraded by businesspeople, lawyers, engineers, Washington hotshots, various scientists. Even their secretaries, who get their notions of what matters from television, hide their smiles behind their hands and give one another the high sign when I turn up—some incomprehensible goofball.

You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well.