Quotes About Understanding

Remember that you own what happened to you.

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we're all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.

You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world.

As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.

If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you'll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.

Make me a channel of Thy peace, that where there is hatred, let me sow love, or at least not fertilize the hate with my dainty bullshit.

The facts of this world will never satisfy the human heart, but what we give each other can, when it holds love.

Love is gentle if sometimes amused warmth for annoying and deeply disappointing people, especially ourselves.

One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.

clarity of vision—especially

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul

Tom said either you learn to live with paradox and ambiguity or you'll be 6 years old for the rest of your life.

Sometimes you run into someone, regardless of age or sex, whom you know absolutely to be an independently operating part of the Whole that goes on all the time inside yourself, and the eye-motes go click and you hear the tribal tones of voice resonate, and there it is - you recognize them.

The bakery, on the other hand, was a family's understanding that a kid didn't have to do or achieve or own anything more for the world to care, and even delight in her.

Other days, though, my writing is like a person to me—the person who, after all these years, still makes sense to me.

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.

P 264: Elizabeth talking to Rosie re Sharon leaving--Try to be a good sport, baby. Sharon feels as bad as you do. It's all right for you to be mad, but...try to be as good a sport as you can. I'll tell you. It's a run-of-the-mill shitty thing. Life is full of them. And it is ALWAYS feels better to be kind.

Sometimes love does not look like what you had in mind

Try to be a good sport, baby. Sharon feels as bad as you do. It's all right for you to be mad, but...try to be as good a sport as you can. I'll tell you. It's a run-of-the-mill shitty thing. Life is full of them. And it is ALWAYS feels better to be kind.

Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.

Polite inclusion is the gateway drug to mercy.

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But

Booker T. Washington said, "I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him

He started to explain his position, trying to get me to engage. I secretly shut my heart to him completely. I forgot that this hurts only me.