Quotes About Understanding

If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them.

She was eager to stoop to his level.

Don't worry...it happens to lots of guys.

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.

It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.

It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people—a great many people—who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better.

There is a way the truth hits you, both hard and gentle at the same time. It punches you in the stomach as it puts its loving arm around your shoulder. Yes, I am terrible to behold, the truth says. But you suspected it all along, didn't you? And isn't better, now that you know? Now, at least, it all makes sense.

Jack hesitated still, and Hazel wanted to say something comforting, give him some bright plastic flowers of words, but Jack would see them for what they were. Jack knew how to see things.

Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren't even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong.

He remembered that part like you'd remember a story someone told to you once, like you might nod in sympathy but it wasn't like it happened to you.

There are differences between facts and truths. Facts are something you now in your brain; truths are things you know in your heart.

She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And she did love them so very much.

Oscar grabbed on to the words and held them.

I identify with all the Grimm fairy-tale girls, every single one. I always have. Those were the only stories I understood and the only stories I kneew how to tell. I did not know there were other possibilitiees.

listen without judgment.

Imagine that your own children, who you brought into the world, just walk past you. It's enough to make anybody crazy.

Wheeler, P., and H. E. Rives. Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

We care. We feel. We think. We do not always miss the absent one. We cannot always come when called. Being friends with a loner requires patience and the wisdom that distance does not mean dislike.

Loners can play well with others-the right others

When people began to throw stones at him, Shibli—so the legend has it—threw a rose, and Hallaj sighed. Asked the reason for his sigh, he answered: "They do not know what they do, but he should have known it." And the saying that "the rose, thrown by the friend, hurts more than any stone" has become a Turkish proverb.

You know very well that no one can enter the heart of another and become as one, not even for the shortest moment. Even your mother only made you flesh, and at your first breath you breathed in solitude