Quotes About Understanding

Remember not all Germans were Nazis.

That's exactly what we all are. We spend so much time trying to figure out what race a person is when we could just get to know them as individuals. I felt like answering their question with a question. Does it matter? Will it make a difference if she is Croatian, Muslim, Serbian?

No matter what race we are, what ethnic background, sexual orientation, or what views we may have, we are all human. Unfortunately, not all humans see it that way. Diary

I mean, it's okay if you're the one with the low sex drive. We'll just have to adjust and learn to accommodate that.

A friend is by definition an unpaid therapist.

Then he was forming letters again, one at a time on her back, while Laurel clung to him, full of heart and body, still joined to him intimately. Wanting his words, needing them, moved profoundly by them. I love you. One letter after the other, until they were all there, telling her everything she needed to know here in the dark.

But I figured every girl on the planet had found herself wishing she had a free pass inside a man's mind at one point or another. Maybe it was self-preservation that we didn't have such powers. It might be holy-crap creepy in there.

Laurel watched his lips intently as he spoke. He thought it was pretty amazing that she knew what he was saying just from reading his lips. But it also meant a lot of times her eyes were on his mouth, not meeting his gaze. Which gave him the sneaky ability to watch her more closely than he could anyone else, without her thinking he was staring.

Because Tammy is in there making like her feet hate each other, and they don't need us around for it.

That sounded like an insult, but he wasn't sure. What's a dillweed? You. You're a dill weed. Well, that cleared things right up.

You can't have understanding without empathy, and you can't have empathy without losing money.

Don't ever fool yourself that facts don't fit, if you get the right explanation. They're just like jigsaw puzzles—when you get them right, they're all going to fit together.

You can't have understanding without having empathy, and you can't have empathy without losing money.

I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing.... Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, I told you so.

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least

I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet-tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.

One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip.

Enter my first neighbor - a woman who spoke in complete, coherent sentences, who ate with a knife and fork and who only cried at weddings. I couldn't help myself. In a dramatic gesture, I bolted the door and threw my body across it to prevent her exit. She understood.

In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV...never had a garage sale.

A child needs your love the most when he deserves it least.

I loved you enough to accept you for what you are, not what I wanted you to be.

The sadist doesn't create a masochist; he finds him already made.

Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.) —SPINOZA

If a thinker throws off too many unsystematic and rich insights, there is no place to grab onto his thought. The thing he is trying to illuminate seems as elusive as before.