Quotes About Understanding

Blessed Stars, please make this world into a place where we will never again be forced to kill an enemy whom we cannot hate. Were such a thing to come about, I would not complain even if my body were torn to pieces again and again.

Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

Information like this had a life of its own, and once it entered her mind, she couldn't unknow or forget it.

If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even.

Human language is a clumsy tool. People have such a hard time understanding each other, so how can you even begin to imagine the subjectivities of animals and insects and plants, never mind pebbles and sand? Bound as you are by your senses -- so blunt and yet so beautiful -- it's impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too. Books are in an odd position, caught halfway in between. We are sensible, if not sentient. We are semi-living.

She knew so much about what was happening in the world, even as she grew more isolated from it.

I thought I understood everything about cruelty, but it turns out, I didn't understand anything at all.

Sometimes you don't need words to say what's in your heart.

So of course I feel angry, I said, angrily. What do you expect? It was a stupid thing to ask. Yes, she agreed. It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you're angry. I don't need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that. So why did you ask? Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me. I asked for you, she said. For me? So you could hear the answer.

At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave. It wasn't my fault that I didn't understand what was happening.

Oh, but wait. It just occurred to me, maybe you don't actually know their secrets? I kind of assumed that books know everything, but maybe you're a stupid book, or a lazy book, the kind that starts in the middle because you don't know how a story begins and can't be bothered to figure it out.

Do all kids have to worry about their parents' mental health?

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth. —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

Obviously there are things a kid doesn't need to know about his parents, but you could tell some of them.

Listen! 'To Benny, who hears the cries of the world.' Isn't that beautiful? And it's so true, don't you think?

Children, I came to understand, need you around, even if they ignore you. In fact they need you around so they can ignore you.

I wonder if any of us ever really knows another person?" she replied, sounding wistful.

What I was learning, on those weekend walks, is how much you can find out about a person merely by watching what he eats. Food became my own private way of looking at the world.

I was slowly discovering that if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.

The trouble with psychology, said Wexford epigrammatically, 'is that it doesn't take human nature into account.

Don't hate anyone," she had said. "It's quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated." So

She believed that friendships, to begin well, had to stand on mutual information and lots of it.

having nothing better to do, meandered off to a coffee shop and sat facing each other for a couple of hours, neither of them talking much but each coming to the general conclusion that the other was a person rather like himself...

Ponekad je mnogo teže iza?i na kraj s glupoš?u nego sa svesnim zlom.