Quotes About Understanding

But how nice it is that one can come to know someone just through correspondence, and become really passionate friends.

The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at all.

To think that we might easily have gone through life not knowing each other, missing all this free flow of love and ideas and warmth and sharing...

If you don't pick your audience, you're lost because you're not really talking to anybody.

What, exactly, is a father if not a man who, once you're grown and gone and out in the world making your own mistakes, all good advice be damned, waits patiently for you to return? And if you don't, well then, you don't. He understands that risk. He knows whose choice it is.

To love me, my family does not need to understand me.

I guess that's how well you know me. You think I like hearing this news." "I'm sorry. This is selfish. I just need to tell someone … outside my life. Get it out of my head, to keep from going nuts, but somewhere safe." She sees me as safe? This brings tears to my eyes. "I trust you, Clem. Are you pissed?

God, Lou. Don't you think I want you to have what you want?" "You're my sister. You're supposed to want those things for me." "You can't have it both ways, Lou. When things get bad, you can't call me—which I'm glad about, I am!—you can't do that and then imply I don't give a shit about you." "That's what I used to think.

Oh, my dear, love isn't always the coup de foudre --the lightning strike. Sometimes it happens quietly, so quietly you may not even notice.

Love's about finding the one person who makes your heart complete. Who makes you a better person than you ever dreamed you could be. Its about looking in the eyes of your wife and knowing all the way to your bones that she's simply the best person you've ever known.

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

Life and reading are not separate activities, When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist.

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.

I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

Did you leave me because of me? No, she said. I left you because of us.

But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person

We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

You must not be angry with me. You must think of me as an incomplete person.

They say time finds you out, don't they?

Or perhaps it's that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?