Quotes About Understanding

The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him.

But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes longer for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women.

But what I mean about being a woman is, we might get married now and stay married for fifty years and I might be a stranger to you every instant of that time and you might never know it.

If one can live with one's own pain then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

O riso e o amor vêm do mesmo lugar: mas pouca gente vai lá.

They knew his taxi better than they knew him, if you see what I mean. People always know the outside better than they know the inside.

There is no reason for you try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

I had never seen the love and respect that men can have for each other. I've had time since to think about it. I think that the first time a woman sees this--though I was not yet a woman--she sees it, first of all, only because she loves the man: she could not possibly see it otherwise.

There are tears on his face, his face or mine, I don't know. I kiss him where our tears fall. I start to say something. He puts one finger on my lips. He smiles his little smile.

He didn't like his sisters and I didn't have any brothers. And so we got to be, for each other, what the other missed.

And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him today something that he must remember and understand tomorrow

Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me.

It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them.

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.

He could not endure being very far from me for very long. I was the only person on God's cold, green earth who cared about him, who knew his speech and silence, knew his arms, and did not carry a knife.

Sometimes you were here all day long and you read or you opened the window or you cooked something - and I watched you - and you never said anything - and you looked at me with such eyes, as though you did not see me. All day, while I worked to make this room for you.

Love him, said Jacques, with vehemence, love him and let him love you

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.

We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.

A few years ago, I would have hated these people with all my heart. Now I pitied them, pitied them in order not to despise them. And this is not the happiest way to feel toward one's countrymen.

They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.