Quotes About Understanding

'Fresh Eyes' was my own little discovery of having been in a relationship for a while and realizing that my favorite part of it is being surprised.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

When I did the original research for 'Odd Girl Out,' I asked every bullied girl I interviewed to tell me what she needed most from her family. The answer truly surprised me. It wasn't having the best solutions, calling the school, or trying to act like everything was okay. It was empathy.

When I read, I don't need a character to look like me, act like me, or think like me. I don't need to have my heart broken. I don't need to be surprised or amused or challenged, and I don't need to swoon.

Nothing, for the most part, surprises me anymore.

I'd like liberals to listen to my show and not feel offended. The fact that the love of my life was a liberal, I think that probably surprises people who expect me to spew just contempt for the other side.

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.

So it's possible that someday, by understanding a little bit more about how the world works, it will come back to help us in some other way that will be surprising.

I didn't know who my daddy was until I was 10 or 12. Surprising as it may seem, he was living right across the street.

The experience of the human, male or female, cannot be completely defined by one startling, surprising, or gigantic life experience.

I think I still have a great sense of adventure and trust, and am surprisingly idealistic given all the horrible things I've seen since I was 25. I think how I have changed is that I have a much deeper understanding of the dark forces in the world, of power.

Most people do surprisingly poorly when dealing with a relative who is hurting, depressed, or anxious - we get defensive and try to solve the problem rather than finding the truth in what the person is saying.

This is the first lesson for writers - or anyone - who conducts interviews: If you want someone to talk, you've got to know how to listen. And good listening is a surprisingly active process. The interviewee is your focus of attention; you are there to hear what he says and thinks, exclusively.

I just try to leave my baggage at the door. I don't want to carry my stuff into a working environment with me, and I expect that from other people. If they can't do it, though, I'm surprisingly understanding.

I've hit 1, 2 and surprisingly I've hit 3 most of my life. Not that I'm going to be hitting 3, but I feel like those are three really different positions in the lineup. And I feel like I've done all of them. I know what's expected at each one of those, and I feel like you can take that experience away.

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.

Over the years, with all the experience, I've become more mature about the subjects I pick. I have a better understanding of what works at the box office. Once the story is finalised, I surrender to the director and follow him. After that, my performances speak for themselves.

What does it mean to believe rather than to know? To surrender to something that's not fact but faith?

It really has become the singular motivation in my life - to surrender to the art and to the free expression of what I may be experiencing in my life spiritually. It is really hard in the face of people who don't get it, but what do you do?

People are impatient. They want things to happen overnight, and have no idea of the circumstances and situations that can surround an individual at times.

To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, religion was mankind's first and therefore worst tool for understanding the world. Yet for all that

El historiador es un experto, no un físico. No busca las causas de la explosión en la fuerza expansiva de los gases, sino en la cerilla del fumador

Si el universo en que han vivido los hombres de los tiempos pasados no tuviera nada en común con éste en que vivo; si esos dos universos no aparecieran, para un cierto grado de abstracción, como variaciones de un mismo tema, el universo del otro me resultaría radicalmente extraño y perdería todo significado. Para que la historia entera me resulte inteligible, los vivos deben descubrirse un cierto parentesco con los muertos.

Books are not missiles, you don't aim them at anybody