Quotes About Understanding

Friends see most of each other's flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.

Because isn't that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn't that the simple magic phrase?

To look into the eye of a horse is to see a reflection of yourself that you might've forgotten. No grief was big enough not to be washed clean in your horse's eye.

This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed; to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

wherever you sit, in whatever blend of familiar and strange, it always pays to stop and ask yourself a simple question that the bankers on the Riviera were not asking: If I was to arrive in this culture, as a total stranger, or as a Martian or child, what might I see?

Tunnel vision is deadly. We need lateral vision. That is what anthropology can impart: anthro-vision.

the need to make the "strange familiar," to make the "familiar strange," and listen to social silence.

Fate gives us relatives for one reason: so that we have to learn how to deal with people we'd otherwise never know.

Here's to looking every new mother in the eye, not just smiling at the baby, and asking her "How are YOU?" Here's to listening for her answer.

I've been married for a long time and there are days when I still wonder, 'Excuse me, but who is this man?

Civil conversations about personal perspective will be welcome in the bunker, if only because we'll be cognizant of the fact that incivility didn't work out too well, given the whole apocalypse thing.

A truly thoughtful lover would not attempt to arouse you with the subtlety of a chimp trying to dial a rotary phone.

When someone genuinely laughs with you, it's proof that you share a certain internal space. And that's not so lonely after all.

You can puzzle over lines all your life and never be satisfied with the meanings you get.

A midwife knows too much . . . But if she is truly a wise woman, she knows when to keep her mouth shut.

It is impossible to say whether the fact that I am instructing my husband on how to eat, or that he heeds my agitation and revulsion not at all and continues to buy tubs of meringues to slurp at will, is more indicative of the state of our marriage.

There is so much more to my father's life and death than how it impacted, reflected on, or revealed me.

There are too few words for who and what human beings are to each other. Language is a territory still mostly uncharted. We are the cartographers, every day, still mapping the human heart.

I am proud because I understand that there are times when self-preservation is more important than sentiment, especially when one is a mother, and I could not afford to be perpetually devoured from the inside out, surrendering my hours and days and weeks and months to this turbulent anxiety

Lately, I've been a little sad that I'm not a gay man.

Experience is a master teacher, even when it's not our own.

We often mistake letting go for giving up. Knowing the difference between the two can make all the difference in the end.

Essence loves whatever is happening because it either created it or allowed you (your ego) to create it for your growth and evolution. What you learn to love about whatever you are experiencing is not how it makes you feel, but how perfectly it is suited to support your evolution toward greater love, wisdom, compassion, courage, patience, and understanding. Life is perfectly designed to evolve us, and that is what is lovable about every moment.

Not only is it not our business to change others, but it's also harmful to relationships to try to do so. Ideas are just not worth the price paid in love lost. Love is more important than any conditioned idea or belief, but if you take your conditioning more seriously than love, you will lose love. The other person will withhold love from you because it will be too painful for him or her to love you.