Quotes About Understanding

We'd have long conversations during which I'd weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if I couldn't hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything?

I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close.

This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I'd made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine.

He was the first person I'd met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn't need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

The same as she'd always done when she'd seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must accept things as they were.

There's nothing you can tell Sugar that doesn't strike her as beautiful and human. Which is why men and women write to her about intimacies they can't share with anyone else, unspeakable urges, insoluble grief. 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.

The words are purposes. The words are maps. ADRIENNE RICH, "Diving into the Wreck" Will you take me as I am? Will you? JONI MITCHELL, "California

I'm going to address you bluntly, but it's a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgment of you.

when we're in the presence of someone else's pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it's a small thing. Like writing a letter.

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

I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again.

think the answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we're angry or scared or in pain.

just close your eyes and remember everything you already know.

Forgiveness means you've found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong.

Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it.

He said, "Don't get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don't need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don't have to be broken for me.

you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.

That your friends have those opinions, however, does not mean that they don't love you or value you as a friend or otherwise think you are one of the best people they know.

I always ask my students to answer two questions about the work they and their peers have written: What happened in this story? and What is this story about?

It's a useful way to see what's there. A lot of times, it isn't much.

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence

I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone.

She looked at her parents, clear-eyed and astonished, like she understood exactly who she was for the very first time. A prisoner of her own body.

People die because they want who they want. They do all kinds of crazy, stupid, sweet, tender, amazing, self-destructive things. You aren't going to make anyone "see the light and realize that what they're doing is wrong." You just aren't.