Quotes About Understanding

Poetry keeps the door open to awe and ensures that we will find our way through the broken heart field of wars, losses and betrayals to understanding, compassion and gathering together.

I study and read poems and try to put myself in them.

By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

I don't want anything from you but the fact of you.

If she lets us down, if she's weird sometimes—just ignore it, and love her. Just love her.

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

The things that link us deepest, we can't feel. Except if they're taken from us.

So we invent reasons for the unreasonable. We are rationalists of the irrational. It

Not hearing impaired but just not hearing which is a way of not caring.)

that I—I have not 'heard' . . . What is it?

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul." —

you cried, they tried to comfort you. But if you were stony faced they let you alone.

Annabel was devoutly religious. She could not have clearly stated what set her Presbyterian faith apart from other Protestant faiths, or, except in the most obvious terms, how it was to be distinguished from Roman Catholicism, an old and much-feared enemy;

The wife felt the rebuke. For some rebukes are husbandly.

If some men supposed themselves free it was only because they did not understand that they were imprisoned—bars could be made of any shadowy substance, any dreamy loss of light.

For Iris has learned that to experience a thing is not to know it, or even to have the power to remember it coherently.