Quotes About Misunderstanding

He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant. It just shows you how wrong you can be. But once he kissed me that was that.

What's weird is when you mean a lot more to somebody else than they ever meant to you. I mean, a whole lot more. Like life on two whole different planets.

People laugh at things they don't understand. It makes them feel safe. But it's a false feeling. They are no safer. They just feel as if they are. The world is full of people too foolish to judge the difference.

I think about the time Mitch asked me why I was such a happy little guy. I was five years old. Pearl had been gone a few weeks. I thought really hard for an answer even though I think he'd gone about his business without expecting one. Then I said, "I think it's because my mother loves me so much." He gave me this look of utter pity, like I was the bravest kid in the world. He missed the point completely, you know?

Not everybody who marries in the church and has a family the old-fashioned way is unhappy." "No, but some are. And even if it's just hit-and-miss . . . even if anybody can fall through the cracks, it's still not what I thought I was buying into at all. It still all feels like it makes no sense.

I don't think she meant any harm." "I'm sure she didn't. But people do plenty of harm when they didn't mean any. It happens all the time.

And that, I realized, is the worst price we pay for living in a dearth of true communication. We go through our whole lives thinking it's only us.

Petey boy?" "No, sir." "Guess." "Before just now I would've said zero.

I don't read you." I guess I didn't really expect him to. Because I'd never told him the beginning of the conversation. I hoped that didn't mean I was getting to be more like my mom.

Once, my father chastised me in the car on the way home because he said I didn't act like I wanted to be there. I didn't want to be there. Nobody had warned me that I was supposed to act.

If Russians knew how to read they would write me off.

I'll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we're wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss.

still not entirely amenable to having this conversation that would not stop having him.

It was not going Frankie's way. Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn't call it a conversation.

Oh, please, do try to explain it to them. We'll be here for ninety years, and at the end of it they'll be quite certain you've told them that Mohammed is a turtle with an excellent singing voice. May you have better luck than I!

The problem with silence is that it can't speak up and say why it's silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance,

Vos quod milia multa basiorum Legistis, male me marem putatis? Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.

Australians say 'pissed off.' Pissed means drunk. Piss is alcohol. To take the piss--that means to send someone up, make fun of them.

trouble is, these people don't understand their own culture," said

asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course," he said. "But what if their husband is their problem?" That possibility hadn't crossed either man's mind.

It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn't nearly as great as I'd assumed.

Even the women began to see us as something so foreign to their community that nothing we said could possibly be of any relevance to them. We

It's so easy for people like me"—a diplomat's son raised abroad and educated in America—"to be totally off base about this country and what it is ready to accept.

Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.