Quotes About Understanding

we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw not only that we weren't the measure of all things, but that there was no measure.

Ik zal nooit vergeten dat zij voor me huilde toen ik dat zelf niet kon.

Now, he can see what he's been trying to do: to bargain with grief. Behind all this frenetic activity there's been the hope that if he keeps his promises there'll be no more pain. But he's beginning to understand that grief doesn't strike bargains. There's no way of avoiding the agony – or even of getting through it faster. It's got him in its claws and it won't let go till he's learnt every lesson it has to teach

If he'd learned nothing else at the Slade he'd learned that men and women could be friends, even intimate friends, without sex intruding.

It's the hardest thing in the world to continue to be aware of someone else's pain.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.

One must always forgive another's passion.

my folks wouldn't read a book if you put a gun to their dicks. but they read people all day long and always get it right.

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Think instead about children. People. Human beings. Feel for once that education is about people—not figures.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.

it was but one of the things that made friendship with me an ambivalent enterprise.

No one has the patent on human suffering. People hurt in different ways and for different reasons.

When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

let them feel the hurt and sorrow of history.

the sadness in her voice touched a deep place within me.