Quotes About Understanding

I never shed a tear that day, but all day long I saw Margaret as her father and her grandfather saw her. I loved her that day with my love but also with theirs.

NOTICE Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

These and other things seem clear when they are off on the outer verges of my mind, but then, when I try to see them straight, they grow misty and fade away under the burden of questions.

he patiently tolerated as much of him as he thought tolerable. The rest he ignored.

It is a serious fault in a man to dislike a boy

I had heard it all before—most of us had—but John T. had never heard any of it, because he usually didn't listen to anybody but himself. He was shocked. For almost a full minute, Sam having spoken to his satisfaction and John T. unable to speak at all, they just looked at each other.

But it was her eyes that most impressed me, they were nearly black and had a liquid luster. The brief laughing look that she had given me made me feel extraordinarily seen, as if after that I might be visible in the dark.

Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it has certainly produced massive evidence of the damage and disorder of its absence.

In a conversation, you always expect a reply. And if you honor the other party to the conversation, if you honor the otherness of the other party, you understand that you must not expect always to receive a reply that you foresee or a reply that you will like.

I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to learn.

Sometimes he would be finished talking before we had started listening.

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with.

Things can only be true in a specific way, for one reader at a time, at a particular moment in a reader's life.

Do you ever think if people heard our conversations they'd lock us up? All the time.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'.

Only a few know, how much one must know, to know how little one knows

Let me speak of Son of Sam. He has been called a mad dog. He is not a mad dog ?- he is a mad human being, perhaps only a step removed from the rest of us. One has to acknowledge him as a human being and to respect his dignity even in his madness. Otherwise, there is the danger that people may start to kill each other like mad dogs.

Friendship is possible with mice.

I didn't think so much of him at first. But now I get it: he's everything that I'm not.