Quotes About Understanding

I love her more than my life. What were you thinking, harming her? Didn't you understand that I'd have to kill you for it?

Besides, I reflected darkly, you shouldn't have to be a lawyer to figure out how to do the laundry.

Readers often feel they know an author because they've read their books. To a degree, this is often true. We write from our individual worldviews, using the beliefs and understanding we have of the world and others.

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. It's the reason... we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.

we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.

the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

Sometimes the thing you fear the most in your relationship turns out to be the thing that brings you and your partner to a deeper place of understanding and intimacy.

Our minds are small, but our hearts are big.

She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

Romantic love is not a competitive sport.

because we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.

Do you know what boundaries are? The best, sanest people on the planet do.

The only place I could reach her. In me.

when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.

I'm also reminded of how those words no longer belong only to me; how, when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.

Will you take me as I am? Will you? JONI MITCHELL, "California

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity.

The Dream of a Common Language

We didn't exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.

A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.

As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn't put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be.