Quotes About Understanding

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.

How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they're at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.

We were fourteen, fifteen years old, and already knew the importance of silence in love.

Angelina, ¿qué no sabes que el amor no puede formarse a través de la compasión»

André Pieyre de Mandiargues rompe una nuez: -Así es tu cerebro, Leonora. -No, el mío va mucho más lejos, perfora la bóveda celeste. Poseer un telescopio sin su otra mitad esencial, el microscopio, es un símbolo de la más negra incomprensión. La tarea del ojo derecho es ver en telescopio mientras el ojo izquierdo se asoma al microscopio.

Es nuestra ira la que nos salva y sin embargo nos resulta casi imposible sacarla y darle coherencia.

En los únicos momentos en que me llevo bien con mis papás es cuando vamos al cine, porque entonces nadie habla. • Victoria Garfias Madrigal, de la Facultad de Ingeniería de la UNAM

Allí donde no le entiendas, en los espacios blancos, en los huecos, pon: Te quiero.

The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.)

Mentally damaged people need more room than the normal sort, they can't be put off with excuses, and they need at least as much space to run around in as a medium-sized sheep dog.

epistemologist?

Who cares about love? Jim replied. That's the easy part. It's only the first part. We were in life together, Alice. We were in life! And if we aren't together now, then we weren't together then? Do you understand?

I guess I've spent my life listening to what wasn't being said.

I was the true future. I understood Communism better than they did.

Our relationship was cursed by the fact that we agreed on everything.

You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.

Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind

Quando l'amore si trasforma in attesa dell'amore non siamo più in grado di capire cosa sentiamo veramente

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

It seems to me that your sense of other people's awfulness might be compensating for your own sense of inferiority and fear of rejection. You rationalize the rejection of your peers by telling yourself it comes from other people's deficiencies rather than your own. They can't understand your philosophy or your ideas.

Each work of criticism is supposed to build on the body of work, to increase the total sum of human understanding. It's not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It's supposed to be cumulative - it believes in progress.