Quotes About Misunderstanding

A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: There's a pedophile! Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I'll tell you, it outweighed anything I'd ever done.' 'What had she done?' I ask. 'Shoplifting,' says Tam. There is silence.

I phoned home but my wife didn't answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn't dead. She had just been at the shops.

the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped.

they saw how well behaved I was, and decided it meant I could only behave well in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad." I

Given humans' tendency to see themselves as the pivots around which all creatures' lives spun, the bewildered travelers assumed the wolves were talking to them.

There is no word in the English language that gets thrown around more freely by people who don't know what it means than "fascism." Indeed, the more someone uses the word "fascist" in everyday conversation, the less likely it is that he knows what he's talking about.

Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.

Quello che in letteratura la gente chiama ironia, di solito nella vita vera si chiama dolore, incomprensione e disgrazia [...].

People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they belly ached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were—stupid.

All we ever argued about was nothing. As if by multiplying zero content by infinite talk we could make it stop being zero. In order to have sex again we´d had to separate, and in order to have frenzied and complusive sex we´d had to get divorced.

The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars. Nineteen seventy-five.

Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24)

on the one hand there's mansplaining, and on the other, there's the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

I'm a vegetarian. You're a what? I don't eat meat. How can you not eat meat? I just don't. He says he does not eat meat. What? No meat? No meat. Steak? No... Chickens! No... And what about the sausage? No, no sausage, no meat! He says he does not eat any meat. Not even sausage? I know! What is wrong with him? What is wrong with you? Nothing, I just don't eat meat!

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.

i couldn't speak the language of his feelings

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words I love you so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women said I love you without his ever speaking. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

Sitting with her now, rehearsing the horrible conversation, Jacob wondered if maybe, all those years, he had misunderstood the spaces surrounding Julia: her quiet, her steps back. Maybe they weren't buffers of defense, but of the most extreme humility, the purest generosity. What if she wasn't withdrawing, but beckoning? Or both at the same time? Withdrawing and beckoning? And more to the point: making a world for their children, even for Jacob.

Als ik ergens vertel dat ik vegetariër ben, word ik bijna altijd gewezen op een inconsequentie of probeert men een zwak punt te ontdekken in een bewering die ik nooit heb gedaan. (Ik heb vaak het idee dat mijn vegetarische levenswijze voor zulke mensen belangrijker is dan voor mij.)

Alex?" I told him yes. "You're my translator, right?" I asked him to be slow, because I could not understand him. In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.

You are a schmuck," I informed the hero. "You're not using the word correctly," he said. "Yes I am," I said.