Quotes About Understanding

It's like, if you love somebody. When they hurt you or let you down, you let 'em know you still love them. That's called unconditional love. Anybody can love somebody when they're making you happy. That requires no special talent. That's also how most people do it. But when you get a little wiser, you know you got to love somebody with all their faults. So,

I just think it's odd how we parse out our empathy," he said. "Why we only have empathy for those who remind us most of ourselves. I'm not saying I don't understand it. Sure, it's easy to have empathy for someone who's just like us. It comes naturally. I just think it's a shame we can't take it a bit further. I can't help wondering what the world would be like if our empathy muscle were a bit more developed.

World is full of people so troubled they don't even understand themselves. You could offer them a thousand dollars to explain their motivations, but they can't tell you what they don't know.

Is that really love? When it happens so fast? She sighed. Paused the movie. Sighed again. Some would say it's only love after you've been together long enough to work out who takes out the trash. And there's something to that. That part of love where you have to work at it. Learn to live together. But when you set eyes on that person, it's something. Call it what you want. If it turns into love, then maybe it's just love in all its stages. It's still real

Every life matters. Even if it's "them.

My daughter was mentally ill," I said. "So I know. It's an illness, just like it says in the phrase. It's not a moral failing. It's funny how people have empathy for a physical illness. They see it as bad luck, and they never question whether you can help it.

I mean you can't change his mind. You can't change anybody's mind. No matter what you say to them. The sooner you figure that out, the happier your life will be." "But

I am not as unstable as people tend to think, but I allow them their margin for error because it allows me mine.

in a corral with the horses. They accepted me immediately. Unlike people, they don't judge much by your outsides. They knew I was one of them. Problem was, when one of the employees came around to ask what I was doing there, I was pretty caught up in being a horse, and I spooked. I felt my eyes widen, showing white all the way around,

I didn't want to pry. I felt like one of those typical white boys who didn't understand a thing. Who didn't even know, until a Japanese boy told me, that his family was not allowed citizenship. Maybe he wouldn't have minded my trying to learn. But I felt intimidated by my own ignorance, sure that every word out of my mouth would be a mistake.

There's no beginning, middle and end to that experience. The split second it happens, it's happened. In its entirety. The only time that really elapses is the time it takes you to catch up. To absorb what just happened to you. And nobody ever thinks it's going to unhappen. Do they?

When somebody holds a view that seems to make no sense, know that it makes sense to them, but for reasons you don't know anything about yet. And I guess in a lot of cases, you never will.

I wonder sometimes why we're all so afraid of one another. Or... actually... no, I don't really wonder. I know why. But I reflect on it. And I think it's a shame.

You don't fall down to love, you climb up to it. There's hard work involved. That's why I believe you can't love someone you don't know. Loving someone is knowing them.

if you meet someone you don't like, or who doesn't treat you right, try to reserve judgment, because you don't know what that person's going through,

But the problem was, I tried to get him to do things that would be the right things for me to do. But I don't think they were the right things for him. I was trying to help him the way I thought he should be helped, but he's not me.

Maybe you hate a thing more than anything. But it's what is. To accept it means to see that it is that way, and that it won't be another way no matter how much you hate it.

But you have to let people go through whatever it is they have to go through. Just be there for your friends. That's all we can really do for each other sometimes.

I just feel like it's our job to take care of them. You know? And when you take care of someone, you should love them the way they are. Not try to make them different.

He had still offered me no return address. I couldn't have written back and given him my reaction to his words, even if I had known what to say.

They reminded her what it meant to allow someone into your life. You see something you like in a man, so you ask him in, but what comes in is all of him. Not only the parts you took a liking to, but the many parts that don't fit with you at all. That's always the way it worked

Now, there are silences, and there are silences, especially in the house where we grew up. If we'd ever talked about the silences out loud, I'm sure we'd have had a hundred different words to identify them like the Eskimos do with snow.

But I've learned in my life that not everything that happens needs to be talked about. Some things are better left alone.

I sat there and listened to every word, but it didn't really add up to something coherent to me. Maybe my brain was too busy, or maybe you have to know the legal system, or both.