Quotes About Misunderstanding

And what you experience as an attack might in their mind be meant as a defense against your attack. What, you say, you never attacked them? Ah, there's the rub.

They Think We Are the Problem

First, paraphrasing gives you a chance to check your understanding. Difficult conversations are made harder when an important misunderstanding exists, and such misunderstandings are more common than we imagine. Paraphrasing gives the other person the chance to say, "No, that's not quite what I meant. What I really meant was . .

Be explicit about what you think the conversation is about, and be explicit about what would be most helpful to you. Then discuss and, if you each need something different, negotiate. Remember: Explicit disagreement is better than implicit misunderstanding. Explicit disagreement leads to clarity, and is the first step in each of you getting your differing needs met.

Why is wrong spotting so easy? Because there's almost always something wrong—something the feedback giver is overlooking, shortchanging, or misunderstanding. About you, about the situation, about the constraints you're under. And givers compound the problem by delivering feedback that is vague, making it easy for us to overlook, shortchange, and misunderstand what they are saying. But in the end, wrong spotting not only defeats wrong feedback, it defeats learning.

Focusing on blame is a bad idea because it inhibits our ability to learn what's really causing the problem and to do anything meaningful to correct it. And because blame is often irrelevant and unfair. The urge to blame is based, quite literally, on a misunderstanding of what has given rise to the issues between you and the other person, and on the fear of being blamed.

Nouilles et fromage en casserole," Parks answered. Claudia showed interest. "I'll have some, please. Sounds like something special." Parks served. Claudia looked down at her plate, looked up at me and moaned, "Why, it's nothing but macaroni and cheese.

You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!

She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

You asked me just now for the truth---well, the truth about any girl is that once she's talk about she's done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.

He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again

It seemed to her the diabolical instrument of their estrangement.

You idiot! said his wife, and threw down her cards.

Young people dislike and even fail to understand our slang; my gay students ask me what "tricking" means. It's all old whore's slang, of course.

had taken place just before Grant's visit, and Wilhelm was unable to receive him. "Here is an old man," says Bismarck, — "one of the kindest old gentlemen in the world — and yet they must try and shoot him!

I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother's death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son.

That was Gabriel. I'd wronged him and he paid me back. I'd been told that he was going with another girl when he wasn't, at the time he was sick, unconscious, after an accident in Wisconsin hauling timber, but these two girls, these two friends, deceived me into believing that I was jilted, which I wasn't.

Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still - otherer people - knew what the other people meant when they said it.

She always said, 'I know you like this,' which was a lie, because he had told her he didn't the last time.

une jeune interprète, idiote en quatre langues

If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing.

I slipped our wicker bed and walked the sands where we were also roughly repeated: some young couple, "you did," "I didn't," "you sure the fuck did" – they hugged that bicker to their chests like blankets fighting cold.

And, when some such suffering beast is seen, on his way to solitude, we humans prove our humanity by raising the idiotic bellow of "Mad dog!" and by chasing and torturing the victim. All this, despite proof that not one sick dog in a thousand, thus assailed, has any disease which is even remotely akin to rabies.