Quotes About Misunderstanding

With what all these people are saying, do you think that anybody wants to be around me? They all think that I did this on purpose? That I knew that I was positive, for so many years? I feel now that I'm going to be attacked if anybody sees me or if I go to the office.

But nobody is listening to those points. They are just listening to the gossip which is saying that I knew I was positive for all these years because I had a faked test a few years ago.

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

Although she failed to grasp the meaning of this speech, she did understand that it might belong to the category of 'scoldings' and scenes of reproach or supplication, and her familiarity with men enabled her, without paying attention to the details of what they said, to conclude that they would not makes such scenes if they were not in love, that since they were in love it was pointless to obey them, they they would be only more in love afterward.

That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life.

People who learn some correct detail about another person's life at once draw conclusions from it which are not accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of things that have no connexion with it whatsoever.

Even his mother, his own mother, had once accused him of being a snob.

It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him.

The two chief causes of error in our relations with another person are, having ourselves a good heart, or else being in love with the other person.

By some men's too much understanding, others are brought to understand nothing at all.

They hate us because we don't even know why they hate us.

By George, I had forty-seven pregnant women with horns trying to take a razoo at me.

Can you believe it? I had a project that was sure to win the silver trophy, not to mention Miss Green would probably get voted best science teacher, and what happens? She won't even listen to me. I also had another problem. Miss Green had told me not to come back until I had washed off the green paint. Except it wasn't green paint, and I didn't know how to change myself back.

She wasn't sure what Mississippi was, but it must be a horrible thing if it was used as a mantra for the guns

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

The demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

Lucas rode up to Kidd's floor in a freight elevator that smelled of oranges and bananas and paint and maybe oil, walked down the hall and knocked on Kidd's hand-carved walnut door, which Kidd said he'd copied from some Gauguin carvings. Lucas wouldn't have known a Gauguin carving if one had bit him on the ass, so when told about it, he'd just said, "Hey, that's great," and felt like an idiot.

Jesus, Kerensky said, looking around. You people. I have one of the most incredible experiences I'll ever have, talking with the one person who really gets me - who really understands me - and you're all down here thinking I'm performing some sort of time-travelling incestuous masturbation thing.

Did she tell you I set puppies on fire, too?" Vann asked. "She did not," I said. "It may have been implied.

Relations were never good (how comfortable can you really be with a race that sees you as a nutritious part of a complete breakfast).

It's not the trees, you dense argumentative spoon

You can't afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace.