Quotes About Understanding

She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after.... She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.

Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together—that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them.

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad.

You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he dies. Like that. D'you see, boys?

She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions? But instead of lowering the boom on him, she just gave a simple answer: "No.

For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. —HOBBES, Leviathan

The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.

Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after. ... She doesn't want you to understand her. She wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.

But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book.

Our policies concerning free speech, telecommunications, and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple, rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken together.

DFW's writing reflects an attitude that is lovely: a touching, and for the most part well-founded, belief that you can explain anything with words if you work hard enough and show your readers sufficient respect.

All fine and simple in principle. The details very complicated, of course.

What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?" Enoch asked.

Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God

I just saved your fucking life, Mom," Y.T. says. "You could at least offer me an Oreo." "What on earth are you talking about?" "It's like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.

But it's easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people.

My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to

parents of small children must perforce have an entirely different sense of irony than unimpaired humankind.

So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, re-reading, and understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these, because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a

What they conceal tells you more than what they reveal.

How can you remember shit like that?" Ty asked.

Jedna z nejdÄ›sivÄ›jÅ¡ích vÄ›cí na skute?ným inÃ…Â¥ouÅ¡ovi pro vÄ›tÅ¡inu lidí není to, že se neumí chovat – protože to zažili vÅ¡ichni – ale spíÅ¡ že se kv?li tomu v?bec necítí hloupÄ›.

Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror.

She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.