Quotes About Misunderstanding

Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!

Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.

As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: 'But darling, why didn't you come to us and tell us?' Lalla's reply is my text for today: 'But I didn't know I could.

I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.

These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz's On Aggression, Ardrey's The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt's Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene).

panegyrics of a man they had never understood

His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.

It was as if words were now a wall between people rather than a bridge, and if you could just build the wall high enough no one would see the growing desert of the vanished on the other side. It was as though everyone was using words to avoid using words for what words were used for.

It did not mean those things he had been told it meant, that the soldier could now rest, that his job was done. What job? Why? How could anyone rest?

Though possibly it–the answer–is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road-watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire.

Though possibly the answer is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire.

Explaining is where we all get into trouble.

Sometimes, when people in the South tell you to have a blessed day, it means fuck you and I hope you have a nice time in hell.

It's easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don't bring you oysters. (Paul Child)

On the phone, we argue. In person, we tend to become sarcastic. Our letters, though, have a touch of romantic collusion.

He seems to think I'm about five, the way he's treating me.' Lizzie took the lantern and placed in on a table. 'I don't suppose you had anything to do with that, didn't you?' 'Oh no,' I said, eyes round and innocent.

And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don't, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.

Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.

If I failed to display negatives, then positives would be assumed: this was how it worked.

Due altre cose ha detto nel corso degli anni: che certe donne non sono affatto misteriose ma vengono rese tali dall'incapacità degli uomini di capirle. da Il senso di una fine

You still don't get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying.

Arthur, my dear," she interrupts. "There is something I wish to talk about." He looks surprised, and slightly alarmed. If he has always valued her directness, there is a residual suspicion within him that whenever a woman says something must be talked about, it is rarely something to a man's comfort or advantage.

Do you think Kinkade is Welland-Dowd? she wondered Chase burst into laughter so booming that every head on the street rotated, startled. Oh,God. She'd just understood when she'd said it aloud. Welland-Dowd. Well-endowed.

Sorry . . . thank you. Good night," she said finally. She pivoted and headed for the house. He stared blankly. Thank you, good night? Like she was Lynyrd Skynyrd, and he was a San Francisco crowd?