Quotes About Understanding

No one knows themselves very well. Who has the time these days? Have you been formally introduced to yourself? Made the effort to get to know your faults and your strengths, sit yourself down to tea and listen to all your troubles, answered the call when yourself falters? Then how can you say you know yourself in the least?

But it is my experience that you learn everything in this world out of order. You only know what you needed to know after it's already done getting ruined all over you.

One doesn't behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.

Most people don't like complexity. They would prefer the world to be simple.

Magic has a logic, like algebra. Once you get to know it, it's easy. If this, then that. You write with a pencil, you don't make frog soup with it.

She listens, and I wish I could give her a little gold trophy for it, but I can't, because of all the things Fuckwits gave trophies for, they never thought listening like nothing exists but time and words was half as important as losing a volleyball tournament.

Monsters, you know, cannot appreciate the niceties of commandments carved in stone.

So you don't love him. Why would you look for love with a man? How could a man ever understand you?

Is she happy? She doesn't understand. She has never considered it. It is possible to be so entirely happy you never ask the question. She is a full glass submerged in water. Neither nor both full and empty. The inquiry, though kind, has no meaning for her.

love may unclose itself between any number of seemingly upside-down and turned-around folk.

CHYTERA: [...] May I... May I ask? You wear a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. Indulge my curiosity? ERASMO: She didn't want to get married. Doesn't mean I wasn't her husband.

September waited. She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.

I'll be into anything you want after breakfast and a coffee and serious medication, okay?

I am so useful. I am not alone. And neither is he. "It must be nice," said Aubergine suddenly, "to have a friend like that, and like things so much." Yes.

You can't blame a book for its story.

And that's how you begin to win over a child. People who share a secret share a heart.

And feeling someone else's feelings...' Never replied softly. 'It's still lonely, but it's so much bigger than lonely. It's not hitting five people or one with the trolley but flying it off the tracks into the stars and sparing them all.

So I talk to the dead. They're the only ones who can see the whole story. All they've got is story.

You have to be able to see the world as a whole to bear it—to see the Queerness that moves in every bit

These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.

like a man in black, she would find all this so much easier. "Ivan, you do not understand us. A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.

Cocky don't say anything and that's as good as love right about now.

His point is, informal English is not wrong, and some of it stems from models older than 'standard' English, and he always puts 'standard' in quotes because there is no standard English, language keeps changing. And to understand language and teach it, you have to know what is actually spoken.

How can you know things have changed, Julian, if you don't know how things were?