Quotes About Understanding

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

There is always room for at least two truths.

But being rational about it didn't cure it.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there. -Rumi

Rami, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there." We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it's crazy.

If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.

It will not be over until we talk

she wondered if she owned a faint idea of many things, and a strong idea of only a few. As if she had developed an immunity to depth. That she only, now, skimmed the surface.

The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.

Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there.

It's nonviolence that is hard to deal with, whether coming from Israelis or Palestinians or both. It's confusing to them.

In the end you should probably know your characters as well as you know yourself. Not only what they had for breakfast this morning, but what they wanted to have for breakfast.

She expected no judgement and wanted no pity.

you soon find out how loud the silence really is. everything unsaid leads eventually to what is said.

She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn't interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazzlyn was too. They were like strangers on a porch, Gloria and Jazzlyn, with the evening sun going down: they just sat there together and neither could say what the other one knew, so they just kept quiet, and watched the day descend. One of them said good night, while the other waited.

Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.

What mystery we lose when we figure things out, but perhaps there's a mystery in the obvious, too.

He was not interested in absolving the attackers, but he had to admit if he had been born under the same circumstances he would undoubtedly have become a fighter himself, maybe even the same sort of man who had murdered his son.

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

Newspapers are read differently now [. . .] Between the lines.

When a man finds the one woman who is right, it scarcely matters what else is wrong. ~ Emerson Berkley

One can appreciate art without being in the market for a painting. That's what I meant.

If we truly understood God's plan for the union between a man and a woman, we'd fight harder. People give up on the husband or wife God has chosen for them too easily. Anyone can walk away, the courage comes in staying and fighting. And if God is in the mix, staying is worth it. Like I said, we just have to understand marriage.