Quotes About Understanding

Era tão fácil (...) descobrir coisas sobre as pessoas. Estava tudo disponível, tudo sobre elas. Bastava procurar. Era possível descobrir qualquer coisa sobre alguém caso se esforçasse para isso.

Everything, she had come to understand, was something like infinity. They might never come close, but they could approach a point where, for all intents and purposes, she knew all that she needed to know.

Izzy, sit up straight," she would say at the dinner table, thinking: Scoliosis. Cerebral palsy. "Izzy, calm down." Though she would never quite articulate it this way, resentment began to sheathe concern. ANGER IS FEAR'S BODYGUARD,

All those years, as the only other person who understood their parents, he had absorbed her miseries offering silent sympathy or a squeeze on the shoulder or a wry smile.

She would listen and listen, waiting for them to come and find her. We didn't know , Hannah thinks. We would have come.

What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure.

There is so much they need to say.

He understood everything she did not say, which at its core was: Don't let go .

Qualcosa in quello scambio di sguardi tra madre e figlia aveva acciuffato il cuore di Mrs Richardson come un retino per farfalle.

I could have done that, Marilyn thought, and the words clicked into place like puzzle pieces, shocking her with the rightness. The hypothetical past perfect, the tense of miss chances.

He had been the only one listening for so long.

How could you blame Mia's parents for not understanding? They had been born in the wartime years; they'd been raised by parents who'd come of age in the Depression, who threw nothing out, not even moldy food. They were old enough to remember when rags became felt for the war effort, when cans and scrap metal could become bullets and cans of grease explosives. Practicality was baked into their bones. They wasted nothing, especially time.

The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you - whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.

Even her beloved Warren gave up at that point -- "I don't need to know how it works, Mi," he told her at last, "I just want to see the pictures" -- and Mia realized that she was crossing into a place she would have to go alone.

You weren't wrong, Margaret said at last. You weren't wrong. But neither was Marie. A small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.

Ter permissão para fazer algo e saber fazer algo são coisas diferentes.

she'd never known. No, she admitted to herself: she'd never chosen to know.

She knew what her parents had longed for, without them saying a word, and she had wanted them happy.

Do you want me to leave?' Lexie shook her head. 'Stay,' she said. 'It's fine. I'm fine. Just stay.' After a moment, Izzy slid a square piece of paper across the table, and Lexie took it and began to follow her sister's lead: folding over, back, to the center, out, until at last she took hold of the corners and pulled and a crane bloomed like a pale flower in her hands.

Any act of writing is an act of empathy: you try to imagine yourself into another person's mind and skin. I tried to ask myself the questions the characters would have asked themselves. The

They never discussed it, but both came to understand it as a promise: he would always make sure there was a place for her.

parking lot.

But Lexie was seldom, if ever, offended: subtle implications and subtexts tended to bounce off the fine mesh of her brain.

there was logic and order to the world; there was a system, and that system could be deciphered.