Quotes About Understanding

Hay tres clases de cerebros: el primero discierne por sí, el segundo entiende lo que los otros disciernen y el tercero no entiende ni discierne lo que los otros disciernen. El primero es excelente, el segundo bueno y el tercero inútil.

Always know what they want to hear - not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.

She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid for what they had done together.

In her own uniquely spirited way, she had pierced his armor and burrowed unerringly into his heart

Mom? I said. She turned. Can I talk to you about something? Of course, darling. Come here. I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say. I need you to be -- I said, and then I started to cry. Be what? she said, opening her arms. Not sad, I said.

One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn't, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.

The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.

19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEAR Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet, shallon, shalop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day she would be left silent.

There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.

our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.

Metti chiunque, anche uno scemo, davanti a una finestra, e avrai uno Spinoza.

The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.

I know sometimes things are hard with Mum. She misses Dad, I said, which was like pointing out that a sky-scraper is tall. Uncle Julian nodded.

As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless.

The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence.

I helped those in, who were locked out, others i helped keep out, what couldn't be let in, so that they could sleep without nightmares.

I looked at the map of India on the wall. Every 14-year-old should know the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn't do to go around without the faintest clue of where Calcutta was.

If you don't know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?