Quotes About Misunderstanding

Every misunderstanding has at its center a breakdown of language.

There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean.

Father was pretty good on the telephone; he counted the holes. Even so, Father still got a lot of wrong numbers, and they made him so cross that he invariably shouted to the persons on the receiving end of his calls—as if the wrong numbers had been their fault. "Jesus God!" he would holler. "You're the wrong number!" Thus, in this small way, did my Father and his Louisville Slugger terrorize a portion of New York.

What woman wants to hear someone say what her husband is thinking? What guy is going to be happy hearing what's on his wife's mind?

Owen and I were eleven; we had no other way to articulate what we felt about what had happened to my mother. He gave me his baseball cards, but he really wanted them back, and I gave him my stuffed armadillo, which I certainly hoped he'd give back to me—all because it was impossible for us to say to each other how we really felt. How did it feel to hit a ball that hard—and then realize that the ball had killed your best friend's mother?

Lupe's language was incomprehensible—what came out of her mouth didn't even sound like Spanish.

But Americans are not great historians, and so, for years—educated by my neighbor—I thought that sagamore was an Indian word for lake.

My excellence confused them

What you think about somebody wants peace, Claude?" "That sounds like a communiss to me." Mrs. Reilly's worst fears were realized.

There is nothing in economic life so willfully misunderstood as the great speculative episode. T

I wasn't saying whatever they're saying I was saying. I'm sorry I said it really. I never meant it to be a lousy anti-religious thing. I apologize if that will make you happy. I still don't know quite what I've done. I've tried to tell you what I did do but if you want me to apologize, if that will make you happy, then OK, I'm sorry.

They want to hold onto something they never had in the first place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual artist or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood everything I ever said if they can't see why I'm with Yoko. And if they can't see that, they don't see anything. They're just jacking off to - it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go jack off to Mick Jagger, okay? I don't need it.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.

If you thought "Rabbie Burns" wrote "Auld Lang Syne," you'd be doubly wrong. Burns never signed his name "Rabbie" or "Robbie" (or, indeed, "Bobbie" Burns, as some North Americans insist on calling him). His signatures included "Robert," "Robin," "Rab"—and, on at least one occasion, "Spunkie.

Most men who rail against women are railing at one woman only. RÉMY DE GOURMONT

If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

So oft in theologic wars, / The disputants, I ween, / Rail on in utter ignorance / Of what each other mean, / And prate about an Elephant / Not one of them has seen.

I punched my buddy in the nose after lunch, now I'm in trouble cause the dean saw the punch.

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

When you talk about emotional, chemical imbalances in people, there is no science behind that.

People have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that's more associated with being cynical-it's kind of a put-down.

It's very odd to observe someone else taking your identity into their own hands and getting it all wrong. I don't think most people will ever get to experience how truly weird it is.

They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.

In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.