Quotes About Understanding

He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.

he doesn't know it, but this touching she does is not only compassionate, but possessive.

I'm all ears," she said. An untruth—her ears were a small part of her—but I let that pass.

It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it is enough to see by.

Do you love me, that's all, he said. That's the only thing that matters. It was the language again, I couldn't use it because it wasn't mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.

We talked about our real mothers and how we wanted to know who they'd been. Perhaps we ought not to have shared so much, but it was very comforting. "I wish I had a sister," she said to me one day. "And if I did, that person would be you.

Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.

One detaches oneself. One describes.

You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?

So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.

But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it's smarter than you.

Are there stars? he asks her. She nods.

I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

But in an account such as this, it is better to be scrupulous about your faults, as about all your other actions. Otherwise no one will understand why you made the decisions that you made.

It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that. Falling

She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.

We should not expect too much from faith," he said. "Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.

hard to get the full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.

Becka said that spelling was not reading. Reading, she said, was when you could hear the words as if they were a song.

The months passed; my life of tiptoeing and eavesdropping continued. I worked hard at seeing without being seen and hearing without being heard. I discovered the cracks between door frames and nearly closed doors, the listening posts in hallways and on stairs, the thin places in walls. Most of what I heard came in fragments and even silences, but I was becoming good at fitting these fragments together and filling in the unsaid parts of sentences.