Quotes About Understanding

Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked - but it's immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.

It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.

The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit--it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.

Family members must forgive one another.

Esskay rested her head on Tess's knee, gazing into her eyes in the soulful way that meant "Pet me," unless there was food handy, in which case it translated to "Feed me.

Because whenever a woman kills her child, every other mother—at least, every one who's honest with herself—has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don't want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they know.

We cannot imagine what we cannot see.

listen, you know? Girls. They don't listen. They're in too much

The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit—it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.

Ask questions. Keep an open mind. Listen to the other person. Focus on finding common ground, areas of agreement. Anger is one letter away from danger

People today are always talking about prejudice and stuff, like the rest of us never knew it.

Laura Lippman

There's more to love than two pelvises in a tussle.

What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether?

We say 'Thank you very much' and 'I so appreciate what you have done' to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offer us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether? And if I use the same old words, did I change what I was trying to say? Did I make it a same old thing?

Mrs. Monaghan says we don't always have to say what we like and what we don't like. We should just practice dealing with it.

We say 'Thank you very much' and 'I so appreciate what you have done' to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offere us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether? And if I use the same old words, did I change what I was trying to say? Did I make it a same old thing?

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

What literature could accomplish by way of moral education was less instruction than an expansion of our capacity for empathy: "it admits us to experiences other than our own.

there's a difference between wanting all stories you read to be about you in the most literal sense, and reading with the hope that you can find a bit of yourself in all stories, however alien they may seem on the surface. When our capacity to identify withers, so does a portion of our humanity.

You could push people away, past their limits, even accidentally, and then it was just too late to get them back

My mother says that when Mrs. Rowley is mean, which is generally the case, it is really because she is just unhappy, and who could blame her with a husband like that . . . She says this is really the only reason people are ever mean--they have something hurting inside of them, a claw of unhappiness scratching at their hearts, and it hurts them so much that sometimes they have to push it right out of their mouths to scratch someone else, just to give themselves a rest, a moment of relief.

I read for the language, not the story.

She would owe this understanding to her time in New York, and even more to Louise. That's what spending time with the young can do--it's the big payoff for all the pain. The young can exasperate, of course, and frighten, and condescend and insult, and cut you with their still unrounded edges. But they can also drag you, as you protest and scold and try to pull away, right up to the window of the future, and even push you through.