Quotes About Understanding

Seeing has little to do with opening your eyes; it's what you feel inside that counts, it's what you know without anyone telling you.

Be grateful if you have walked through the world with another's heart in your hand.

Franny whispered to Haylin all that she ever was and had been. She told him that she had always known what the future would be, and he said that if what she said was true, then she should have known a very long time ago that this was meant to be.

Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own.

Love was never a mistake, even when it wasn't returned.

You can only know a friend so well after all. When you come right down to it, even your best friend is a puzzle.

What did we know about those closest to us, really? No one ever dared to speak plainly about desire; no one said the word out loud.

Who can you trust if not your sister? Who knows your story better than she? If you saw one Owens sister at the grocery, the other would be right beside her. If one was working in the garden, making certain the rows of herbs were weeded, her sister would be there as well, carrying a basket to collect the dandelion greens.

If anything, love was like light, illuminating what no one would have ever guessed was there in the darkness.

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn't been divulged. It was exactly like dreaming the same dream, then waking too soon and never finding out what had happened.

The only way to understand a river is to jump into it.

I'm sticking with books. They never let you down and they don't judge you.

I would not begin to understand until I was a very old woman, and even then they would still be a mystery.

Why can't people say what they mean at the time?

Uncross your knives

She judged people smartly and quickly, and often found herself in a huff.

It's for your own good," she said tenderly. "All I want for you is a normal life." "Mother," Franny sighed. "What makes you think that's what I want?

History is personal . . . All that you are seeing is what's before you, the rest is guesswork.

Is there more to the story?" Vincent asked. "There's more to every story," his aunt told him.

She read the color-coded series of Andrew Lang's fairy tales to her mother. They became lost in an enchanted cottage with vines growing over the window. It was dark and it was quiet and they could hear each other softly breathing. Every story had the same message: what was deep inside could only be deciphered by someone who understood how easily a heart could be broken.

A book doesn't live when it's written. It lives when it's read.

I thought perhaps I had been wrong, too quick to judge the essence of a being by its appearance, still not fully understanding that, in the world God has given us, all things must change.

I am not an idiot. It's just that sometimes there are things that I don't want to know.

You are the one who taught me that love was never what we expected it to be and that it was all we needed. For that, and for a thousand other things, I send my gratitude.