Quotes About Understanding

Love, he had ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown.

The more you learn, the less you fear.

Why should a word in a recipe be less important than a word in a novel? One can lead to physical indigestion, the other to mental. I

finding another woman can bring an exceptional clarity of mind to a man all of a sudden.

And perhaps I I didn't even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.

Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.

It was possible for couples to not discover that they are in profound disagreement over the very fundamentals of life until ten or twenty years of marriage.

The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.

Oliver did not seem to understand that the only real fulfilment on this earth was to be gained through hard work. Life as a series of momentary pleasures satisfied no one. He needed to make an investment in it, an investment of himself.

Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

You must decide whether you wish to get on with your children or live at war with them.

moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to

Lies are so complicated, she thought. And not for the first time.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

When I met you, I thought we were meant for each other, even though, in some ways, seemed very different and we kept fighting. But now ... What? Now I think we're meant for each other, but we are doing to each other, to become the people we become. You know what I mean.

First, you hand over some basics--overwhelming joy, existential angst, a giving-in to desire, etc. And then you promise to withstand talking idly about the weather, to encourage cliché, to uphold the virtues of average. You hand over the need to be understood and, in return, you get a bar of Normal soap. And you can wash in it and be daily reborn to a safe world of modest, enduring love or, at least, mild, well-mannered bonding.

When I first met you, I thought we were made for each other even though we seemed like opposites in some ways and we fought. But now... What? Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other—into the people we should become. Do you know what I mean?

To know someone, to be known. That matters more than he'd ever thought it would.

I don't know you. That's the problem.

I am who I am at any given moment…. That's the only way you can know me.

I know that I am—all that I am. And all that I am is full and ripe. All that I am is standing still, waiting and watching and bursting with life. Holding the straining seams of my skin, my passion and wit and my sanity in. Waiting for someone to soothe and to say "I understand. You're home.

Good God. He doesn't know me at *all*. How crushing. How illuminating. How ... potentially very useful.

Your happiness, quite simply, is my happiness. Cynthia slowly closed her eyes against the look in his. Cannot bear.