Quotes About Understanding

Everyone reacted differently to being spoken to in a language they didn't understand. Katya got quiet and scared. Ivan leaned forward with an amused expression. Grisha narrowed his eyes and nodded in a manner suggesting the dawn of comprehension. Boris, a bearded doctoral student, rifled guiltily through his notes like someone having a nightmare that he was already supposed to speak Russian.

Already we were competing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn't a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.

Just think," he said. "What would your mother say?" Tears welled to my eyes. My mother would be sorry for me.

linguist called Alla who advised us, among other things, to treat our more stupid students with sympathy, "as if they had cancer." While

But you aren't really looking!" she exclaimed. "You are—" She flipped through her dictionary. "Wool, gathering!" "That's true," I said. "I am woolgathering." "You are thinking about your friend," she said. "That's why you don't want to listen to me." "But Rózsa. Don't you ever like to . . . to do woolgathering?" "No! I am not a dreamer.

You bet. But I'd rather be bitter than frivolous. Okay, my sexual experience might be limited to kissing my cousin's boyfriend in the Belgrade zoo at age thirteen, whereas Sanja is having an affair with a thirty-five-year-old married newscaster. But even so, I think I have a deeper understanding of love than she does.

What was it to know each other?

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.

The Other," I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism. "That's

Essays can be such a pain! Basically, the reader isn't on your side, so you can't leave out any of the logical steps. And sometimes when a connection is delicate, the steps take too long to spell out–it just isn't possible, by the time you get to the end of the steps, the mood is lost.

I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said "you can feel the food." That was how Owen would end up with students who said "savor," while I would end up with students who said "papel iss blonk.

In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought, and to deploy these thoughts in relation to the things that other people said, while exercising caution to not betray ignorant or antisocial ideas, and the whole thing had been so much to think about that in the end I usually hadn't said anything at all.

I forgave him for a lot when he said that. I forgave him for almost everything.

but I couldn't see him or talk to him because he didn't love me. I couldn't be with him for one minute, not even for the weird leftover hours that nobody else wanted, like from one to three a.m. on a Wednesday." "'In Turkey? You wouldn't have a nervous breakdown. You'd give them a nervous breakdown.' I forgave him for a lot when he said that. I forgave him for almost everything.

A lot of people think I'm that guy in 'Betsy's Wedding', but I'm not. What it is for me is that, on some level, I connect with the character emotionally.

Ask not the grass to give you green, and later walk all over it.

How often people come to us, children to parents, wives to husbands, friends to friends, trying to unload their burdens, and as we sit there listening, our minds and hearts are thousands of miles away. If we were completely present to each other, we would rightfully expect miracles to happen. To be completely present to others is to help them experience the personal love of God.

For too many of us religion has come by inheritance. We have never said to God as Job did, "I had heard of You, Lord, by the hearing of the ear, but now I have seen You." In other words, "Now I have seen You with my own eyes. Now I know you personally." Most of us have become disciples of the disciples of the disciples of someone in the past who had personally experienced God. But it is impossible to transmit real love or commitment this way.

Truly tolerant people are hard to offend.

There is nothing more blinding than having seen the light, and nothing more tiresome than sharing it.

Infatuation is measured in pleasure. Love is measured in pain. Behold the value of pain!

Sympathy is to love thy neighbor. Empathy is to leave her alone.

Whatever else we may also be discussing, "enlightenment" was a concern with the understanding of the historical evolution of the human mind.

It was once said that religion explains in terms of agents what science explains in terms of processes.