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Quotes About Misunderstanding

It is characteristic of Dickens who, when he grasps the wrong end of the stick, never fails to belabour everyone in sight with it.
~ Peter Ackroyd
He would never believe, in his wildest dreams ,that she no longer loved him. She had said it once, but he would dismiss these sorts of things as temperament or wine as if a bottle contained an infusion of foreign thoughts with which she had innocently poisoned herself.
~ Peter Carey
Indeed, everyone familiar with business today has seen situations in which a manager's attempt to avoid misdirection through changing his manners has converted a fairly satisfactory relationship into a nightmare of embarrassment and misunderstanding. The manager himself becomes so self-conscious as to lose all easy relationship with his men. And the men in turn react with: "So help us, the old man has read a book; we used to know what he wanted of us, now ,we have to guess.
~ Peter F. Drucker
En otras ocasiones ella hacía con sus relatos planes para el futuro: <>. Ahora callaba. Intentó conmoverla con recuerdos comunes, pero tampoco respondió a ellos. Las antiguas bromas, que siempre la hacían reír, la dejaron impertérrita. ¡No quería seguir los juegos tácitamente acordados!
~ Peter Handke
Who's calling? Don't insult me like that, the voice says. I stop. Was I just insulting?
~ Peter Hedges
Wang Chaosu shouted everything at me, the way many Americans do when they meet foreigners with bad English.
~ Peter Hessler
Whoa, don't assume, dude, Marco said. My mom always said, when you assume you make an ass of u and me --
~ Peter Lerangis
I DON'T THINK so." I blinked upward into Cass's face. His hair was haloed by a fluorescent ceiling light. I was in a glaringly bright room with puke-green walls and a tiled floor. My arm was attached to an IV stand, and by the wall was a wheeled table with beeping medical machines. "Huh?" I said. "You called me Mom. I said, 'I don't think so.'" "Sorry," I said. "The Dream.
~ Peter Lerangis
The old lady told us Do not wake Ruhan', Jake replied, but who knew Ruhan was a chimpanzee? Apparently I said something that sounded like 'I ate your bananas' in Estonian.
~ Peter Lerangis
returning to Russia, where he met his first wife, Ekaterina. She thought Heinrich [Schliemann] was richer than he was, and when she discovered her mistake, she withheld conjugal rights. This had the desired effect, and he cornered the market in indigo, to such effect that Ekaterina bore him three children.
~ Peter Watson
As I believe I told you before, there had been some slight unpleasantness between us, arising from the occasion when she had sent me over to New York to disentangle my cousin Gussie from the clutches of a girl on the music hall stage. When I tell you that by the time I had finished my operations Gussie had not only married the girl but had gone on the halls himself and was doing well, you'll understand that relations were a trifle strained between aunt and nephew.
~ Unknown
The Manchester Guardian noted: 'People do not understand this legalistic attitude to affairs of life and death.
~ Philip Hoare
Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.
~ Philip K. Dick
Am I the only one who knows? I'll bet I am; nobody else really understands Grasshopper but me - they just imagine they do.
~ Philip K. Dick
The termination of a relationship, he said, is not a misunderstanding. It's a reorganization of life.
~ Philip K. Dick
Exchange between Arctor and Barris: "Now that my Olds is laid up indefinitely, Arctor said, "I've decided I should sell it and buy a Henway. What's a Henway? Barris said. (…) About three pounds, Arctor said.
~ Philip K. Dick
You're full of shit," Miss Stickyfoot said disdainfully. Cadbury said, "That proves I understand Zen. Do you see? Or perhaps the fact is that you don't actually understand Zen yourself.
~ Philip K. Dick
At least that was what she had told me. You never know with women. What they tell you and what they don't tell you is a very long bridge across a very wide river with all kinds of fish.
~ Philip Kerr
I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
~ Philip Larkin
Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea? Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves?
~ Philip Pullman
They were all looking at Mary, and she felt more than ever like the new pupil at a school where they had high expectations of her. She also felt a strange flattery: the idea of herself as swift and darting and birdlike was new and pleasant, because she had always thought of herself as dogged and plodding. But along with that came the feeling that they'd got it terribly wrong, if they saw her like that; they didn't understand at all; she couldn't possibly fulfill this desperate hope of theirs.
~ Philip Pullman
Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again.
~ Philip Roth
In a burst of calculated sincerity—miscalculated sincerity, it turns out—I tell one of the girls how the sight of her breasts pressing against her arms had led me to wish I were those arms. And is this so different, I ask, pushing on with the charm, from Romeo, beneath Juliet's balcony, whispering, "See! How she leans her cheek upon her hand:/ O! That I were a glove upon that hand,/ That I might touch that cheek." Apparently it is quite different.
~ Philip Roth
You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman. Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it.
~ Philip Roth