Quotes About Understanding

Gos had steely pinions and a mad marigold eye, and hopped and flew and mantled his great wings over a fist of raw liver. He cheeped like a songbird and was terrified of cars. I liked Gos. Gos was comprehensible, even if the writer was utterly beyond understanding.

That the boy in short trousers was already the man they'd known, the man who had always got the picture, had always pulled the story from the jaws of defeat.

What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we've learned from the world.

You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow. History

You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'.

You could reason out that adults did not have to explain to each other, but instinct was so often more accurate than reasoning.

This book aims to capture, and explore, the outrageousness, inventiveness, and sheer fun that characterize classical mythology. But it is also born of the conviction that myth matters. It mattered for the ancient Greeks and Romans, and it matters for us in understanding who we are: our selves, our liberties, and our lies.

School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it's getting better or worse. But really it's the same thing for years and years.

I like to hear the marching of typewriter keys, the shudder of the space bar, the metallic ding at the end of a line. Those sounds are encouraging, sounds made by someone who is interested in you and in what you're saying, someone who understands exactly what you're getting at. "Hmm," the typewriter says. And "Mmmm. I-see-I-see-I-see." And sometimes it chuckles....

How will I know I've grown up? When I've started using words I didn't really know the meaning of. I said I did that already and she said yes but I worried about it and grown-ups didn't.

You feel you've seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.

How can you know me and want to die?

Do you think that maybe we're able to love someone best when that person doesn't know how we feel?

Didn't she know that knowing why doesn't make things any less scary?

Easy to see the solution when you're not in the story, isn't it.

Bisi, how could you, now? You know that when you pray, you are heard, if not by God, then by yourself. When you pray, you tell yourself what you truly want, what you really need. And once you know these things, you can do nothing but go after them. Sae you understand?

But Jess was sliding breathlessly down into the waiting sky, so she couldn't find the words to tell TillyTilly that sisters was something about being held without hands, and the skin-flinch of seeing and simultaneously being seen.

Were those exact words said: 'I no longer love you'?" "No." "No. Hardly anybody ever says it like that, do they? They simply become unkind.

Funny to do something and then realise the reason for it afterwards.

There were days when she'd open her eyes and be him for six hours in a row; she knew all his secrets and nothing he had done seemed wrong to her, she knew how it was, how things had been, she was there. There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty. But who finds happiness interesting?

know the risk I run when I find fault with people more often than I look for something to appreciate. It's like having grit in your eye; you see less and less of the real person standing right in front of you and more and more of the grit in your eye.

What's the matter, Jess? Why are you sad?' And she'd have to explain that she wasn't sad, just tired, though how she could be so tired in the middle of the day with the sun shining and everything, she didn't know. It made her feel ashamed.

I've always had a hard time figuring out what the moral of a story is supposed to be, and she was bound to know: She'd been to college.

Have you ever heard a note in someone's voice that said 'This is the end?' I heard it in the next words he said to me, and I stopped listening.