Quotes About Understanding

Not that I don't get where she's coming from. But when you're nervous and somebody else is nervous, too, you feel like you want them to help you stay calm. Maybe it's not a reasonable request, but you do. Otherwise their nervous kind of stands on the shoulders of your nervous, and then the whole nervous thing is so big and tall that it gets to be too much nervous for anybody to bear.

got that when a person is rude and abusive to me, it's not about me at all. They can say something terrible to me or about me, but they're revealing themselves, not me. It has nothing to do with me. They're just showing me the landscape on the inside of themselves as they project it out onto somebody else. Does that make sense?

It was that ugly moment when you had to back up through time inside your head, and reframe everything you thought you knew about somebody. You had to revise reality after the fact. At least the reality you thought you knew.

Because when you really love someone, you want them to be happy. Even if it can't be with you.

I'd say, yes, the horse has a way of communicating pain without words. I can't always put my finger on how.

Thank you for letting me know I have a knower. Not that you ever told me I did, exactly. But when you told me you did, that there were things you knew with your knower, I checked inside myself. Imagine my surprise.

Thirty-six years. I'm not saying I know it all. In one way, we've all just got the time since we got up this morning. But I've seen a lot of people walk a lot of roads. Some not so happy. And it makes them what they are. So if you run around putting a pillow under people to cushion their fall . . . well, I'm just not sure it's quite the favor we think it is.

I overheard her tell my mother that it didn't matter anyway, because we were entirely too young to understand a term like indecent exposure. She didn't realise that children file away such words, awaiting definition.

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.

If you listen to people, they'll tell you a lot, even when they don't mean to.

They can't just be in that moment of grief with you. They can't just say, 'Yeah, this is some pretty awful stuff.' They have to try to fix it. They have to solve it for you in a couple of sentences, which is ridiculous, because it never solves anything.

She thought about the rifles and the dead animals in the living room, and the vote of no confidence in cats. 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.

Then, like anything else that can't be understood, that can't be influenced, we let it go by.

He wished he could communicate what he knew to this frightened boy. But that never did any good anyway. People learned by what they experienced. It mattered little what anyone said to anyone.

I just thought maybe if I knew more, I could worry less." "Oh, I doubt that," she said. Then, "I can't really tell you how it's going, because I don't really know. He's talking to me. Talking is better than not talking. But beyond that it's hard to say.

How would you feel if somebody blamed you for something your mother did?

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. But mental illness we still treat with shame.

get it. How did you not know?

suit the feelings of those we love and want to protect.

Just because I don't think normally doesn't mean I don't know normal thinking when I hear it.

People need help with perspective sometimes. If they're all alone in their own head, they can lose perspective. Sometimes you need to use somebody else like a mirror.

Then he asked, "How long did it take you to love her?

Loving someone is knowing them.

It was not news to him that many people in the world—the entire population of grown-ups, for example—behaved in ways he could not understand.