Quotes About Understanding

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

It's a bit o' real lace, ses the gal, twisting her 'ead round to look at the collar; it cost me one and two-three only last night. One an' wot? ses Charlie, who, not being a married man, didn't understand 'er. One shilling, ses the gal, two pennies, and three farthings. D'ye understand that?

The list goes on. There are myriad versions of the talk because there are myriad ways to be human. And we wish we had the space to capture all of these conversations within these chapters, because we know they are happening, and we know people are hurting.

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.

A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.

How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful.

The earth-self observing the Cosmos and trying to understand the Cosmos by scientific principles from which its self is excluded is, beyond doubt, the strangest phenomenon in all of the Cosmos, far stranger than the Ring Nebula in Lyra. It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos.

A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them but also what is wrong with you.

Tell me something. Why did I have to know the truth about Margot and know it with absolute certainty? Or rather why, knowing the truth, did I have to know more, prove more, see ? Does one need to know more, ever more and more, in order that one put off acting on it or maybe even not act at all?

own death is what you really love and won't be happy till you have, what then? Then we'll know, won't we?

We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.

If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness. Perhaps, Dominick, you have yet to emerge fully from the pond where you swam that morning so long ago. And perhaps, when you do, you will no longer look into the water and see the reflection of a son of a bithc.

So maybe that's what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.

As anxious and limited as that love might have been, it had been love nonetheless.

Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others.

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference.

So maybe that's what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was. At any rate, I'm glad she doesn't know about the corpse that's down there in that well. I've spared her that much.