Quotes About Understanding

You've got to be an observer. And you've got to take time to listen to people, talk, to watch what they do.

He looked up at her. Something passed between them. And I saw that he answered to her, too. But that he didn't answer to her authority, like the governor's, or her shrillness, like Aunt Hannah's, but to her gentleness.

And I longed to tell Uncle Lawrence, to show him I knew when to keep quiet. But I'd long since found out that too often we can't say the very thing that will redeem us. And if that isn't being grown-up, I don't know what is.

When you learn about someone, hear their stories, you tote them around. They flow in your blood and your dreams. They become a part of you.

Ebie, dear child. And he took me in his strong arms. You aren't angry with me? I couldn't believe it. Angry? Of course not. Courage is shown in different ways, Ebie. If others don't always recognize it, that's their fault, not ours.

He knows the most important language of all. Human compassion.

My shadow serves as the friend I crave.

The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We've always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.

You do not know just what you've been forgiven.

It's just that when you're standing beside an open window at twilight, you can say more to each other than in bright sunshine. It's easier to whisper your feelings than to shout them from the rooftops. I believe that trust has to come from both sides; I also think that's the reason why we've never really grown close.

Men are strange beings, and must not be judged by rules that apply to women.

Don't put it into words. Let us leave some things to be understood, not said.

What matter is the information, not what you think about it.

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychological one.

at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

the older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us - and love us despite what they know about us - are the joists that hold up the house of our existence.

I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.

Perhaps only when we've made our peace with our own selves can we really be the kind of friends who listen, advise, but don't judge, or not too harshly.

What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.