Quotes About Understanding

People could surprise you. Not just their kindness, but also their sudden ability to express things the right way.

I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.

What is it like to be you? I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person.

And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.

I see." I didn't see, though. How do we ever see something about our own self?

I thought as I walked back to the airport—I thought: I know what that man feels like. (Except of course I do not.) But I thought: It's odd, because on one hand I think I am invisible, but on the other I know what it is like to be marked as separate from society, only in my case no one knows it when they see me. But I thought that about that fat man. And about myself.

That day of the parade in the Village, I think--but I'm not sure--that William and I had a fight. Because I remember him saying, "Button, you just don't get it, do you?" He meant I did not understand that I could be loved, was lovable. Very often he said that when we had a fight. He was the only man to call me "Button." But he was not the last to say the other: You just don't get it, do you?

It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author," and that alone made me glad I had come.

Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can't stand the blah-blah-blah.

She felt she had figured something out too late, and that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late.

Everyone thinks like themselves, this is my point.

She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.

we never know, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully. It seems a simple thought, but as I get older I see more and more that she had to tell us that.

To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.

I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered. I don't know what my mother remembered either.

People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

Mensen zijn eenzaam, dat wil ik hier maar mee zeggen. Veel mensen kunnen niet tegen degenen die ze goed kennen zeggen wat ze misschien wel zouden willen zeggen.

The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago.

We are alone in these things that we suffer.

We want the news that is kept secret, the unsayable things that occur in the dark crevices of the mind on a night when insomnia visits. We want to know, I think, what it is like to be another person, because somehow this helps us position our own self in the world.

It was Henry's nature to listen, and many times during the week he would say, 'Gosh, I'm awful sorry to hear that, ' or 'Say, isn't that something?

Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do

It was to be taken seriously, Olive saw this. All love was to be taken seriously, including her own brief love for her doctor. But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much. Olive finally said, leaning forward in her chair, "Here's what I think, young lady. I think you're doin' excellent." Then she sat back. What a thing love was. Olive felt it for Betty, even with that bumper sticker on her truck.