Quotes About Understanding

Each others' lives are our best textbooks.

I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.

Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

We learn most where we know the least.

What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.

There are black doctors and doctors and women novelists and novelists. Any less powerful group gets the adjective, while the powerful group takes the noun. The less powerful group usually knows the more powerful one much better than vice versa. People of color have to understand white people in order to survive; women have had to know men. Only the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.

A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.

Women have to learn how to talk as much as we listen. Men have to learn how to listen as much as they talk.

I'm not sure we can understand another country if we don't understand our own.

The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.

What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides. Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two, and those who don't.

Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.

There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.

Anybody can be with you when you're right, but only friends are with you when you mess up.

I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.

Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.

people in the same room understand and empathize with each other in a way that isn't possible on the page or screen.

a crucial purpose of birth families is to make sure we know, value, and even love people we don't agree with.

In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy.