Quotes About Misunderstanding

Why would I have quit Van Halen? It never happened.

I thought Norton-Taylor sounded more interesting than Norton alone. Anyway, people were constantly getting my name wrong when I was Judy Norton. People called me Morton and Martin and other variations.

Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what humans like, and we assume our pets like what we like. We're wrong.

At various points, I've had a massive chip on me shoulder. I had fights about me accent with loads of those fellers you get from third-class public schools. They used to think I was speaking German.

We can't disrespect, by way discounting or misunderstanding our different sticking points, the beliefs of the various groups comprising the tea party movement, but we all have more in common with each other than we do with factions on the Left: the communists, the socialists, the say-they're-anarchists-but-are-actually-socialists.

Since neither black animosity nor the Left's falsehood of 'racial tensions' is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America could do will affect either many blacks' perceptions or the leftist libel.

The thing with gymnastics is people don't always know the events. So they'll ask me about the rings, and I'll have to say, 'Women don't do that.' Or they'll use the wrong words, like horse instead of vault. They get confused.

While Person A might believe the kitchen counter provides a reasonable surface on which to place one's balled-up sweatsocks post-gym, Person B - about to cut up some vegetables on that same counter, perhaps for a meal intended to be shared with Person A - can only read the sockball as a message that says, 'Hi! I have contempt for you!'

But you know, as a kid I would have thought of a vegetarian as a wimp.

I kind of feel for the vegetable world - the vegetarian world. It's almost as if people look at them like aliens or foreigners.

On tour it's hard to be vegetarian, especially in Europe because vegetarianism is basically unheard of. They think you're either joking or mad.

I wanted to write a first contact thing and I vaguely knew I wanted it to be in a beating the beast vein.

When I was four I joined a group of girls who were talking about their party dresses. I thought they were imagining, so I imagined a fantastic pink velvet dress with lots of jewels. But they were simply describing what they actually wore, and they had utter contempt for my obvious fiction. After that, I never joined a group again.

My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.

Children are so used to seeing puppets that when they see a real ventriloquist they don't understand it.

Some people misconstrue our band just to be a commercial venture.

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus: they agree on little and understand each other less and less.

I know I have difficulties with some verbs. But if they get me, they get me. And if they don't understand me, they don't understand me.

You know how much I am inclined to explain all disputes among philosophical schools as merely verbal disputes or at least to derive them originally from verbal disputes.

I've put out a lot of stuff that just confused and alienated people: a huge chunk of songs that were verbal and musical challenges to myself, thoughts I was keeping myself busy with, nothing I had any intention of anybody grasping onto.

I know exactly what my songs are about and I try not to tell people, because a friend of mine really loves 'Stop Your Tears' and I made the mistake of telling her what it's about one day. Now she has to distract herself and look elsewhere when I sing the last verse about being at the river with the baby, because she knows too much.

One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.

In any relationship that comes to an end, there's never just a baseline reason why. You say, 'Oh, I broke up with my girlfriend.' Someone says, 'Why?' You say, 'Well, you got three hours? And then maybe after I tell you my version, you've got to talk to her.'

At the age of twenty, without experience or advice, my mother was torn between two moribund creatures. Her marriage of convenience found its truth in sickness and mourning... Upon the death of my father, Anne-Marie and I awoke from a common nightmare. I got better. But we were both victims of a misunderstanding: she returned lovingly to the child she had never left; I regained consciousness in the lap of a stranger.