Quotes About Understanding

Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.

Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.

Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.

To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.

Even if we can't completely comprehend, we might care.

A Book Is a Heart That Only Beats in the Chest of Another. ~Rebecca Solnit on the Solitary Intimacy of Reading and Writing

Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.

When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anectodes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.

As a scientist, I don't believe that our messages are ignored by the public because people don't care. Many people don't have a science background or find it challenging to stay engaged in a technical debate that can be really alienating

forth. You deny the relationship between cause

With red-rimmed eyes and a wavering voice, he said, "I want you to know that I am sorry. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to understand this." I held the gaze of a man softened by humility, and gently said, "It's all right. You are here now. It's not too late." Change happens gradually, then suddenly. It's never too late to be part of the social movement that will help heal our world.

If you lack words for a phenomenon, an emotion, a situation, you can't talk about it, which means that you can't come together to address it, let alone change it.

the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.

Jewish tradition holds that some questions are more significant than their answers.

And yet the experience happens anyway. Again and again I have seen people slip into this realm and light up with joy. The lack of language doesn't prevent them from experiencing it, only from grasping and making something of it.

There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either.

knowledge can numb as well as awaken feeling.

We'd never set eyes on each other before. But that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.

he aprendido que cierta cantidad de dudas sobre las propias posibilidades suponen una buena herramienta para corregir, comprender, escuchar y progresar, aunque demasiadas pueden ser paralizantes y la total confianza en uno mismo produce idiotas arrogantes.

It's only when you've pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask.

As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

you do not have too many boogeymen for me. You have just the right number.

Books are living things with blood and bones, and it breaks our heart when people dissect them.