Quotes About Understanding

Tan cierto es que la duda o la incredibilidad inician un movimiento que aleja todo de usted, como que la fe y el propósito inician un movimiento que le acerca todo. Es al no entender esto, que la mayoría de la gente fracasa.

But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.

There was no feeling at all between Joan and me, so I talked about myself. I talked without stopping for two hours about myself, pulling little sounds of understanding out of poor Joan's mouth the way in prison we pulled plates of food from slots in the doors.

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

We write to make sense of it all.

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you.

I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept.

When we're young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old.

It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to understand it then, and I have not repudiated it till now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death - the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant.

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

Buenos dias ," she said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life. With me it was always to be done in words; Sid too, though with less confidence. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness or frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.

In all honesty, what I believe is neither inspirational nor evangelical. Passionate faith I am suspicious of because it hangs witches and burns heretics, and generally I am more in sympathy with the witches and heretics than with the sectarians who hang and burn them. I fear immoderate zeal, Christian, Muslim, Communist, or whatever, because it restricts the range of human understanding and the wise reconciliation of human differences, and creates an orthodoxy with a sword in its hand.

Early in the anti-Vietnam War movement, Stegner marched with the students, but later, when the demonstrations turned violent, he was revolted and couldn't understand how breaking all the windows on the Stanford campus could bring an end to the war.

This is not a journal", he wrote, "it is not notes for a novel, not a line-a-day record of the trivia my mind dredges up. Call it an attempt to understand." (Bruce) -Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Pg. 436)

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

I am a native in this worldAnd think in it as a native thinks.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last,To understand, as if to know becameThe fatality of seeing things too well.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.