Quotes About Understanding

As for her, I'd forgotten her for the moment. So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true—all the rest's a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here.

Why did you love her?' 'Well,' I say, 'what a question, anyway!' How on earth can you say why you love people? You might as well say you know where the lightning is going to strike.

Je ne savais bien comprendre que le témoignage de mes propres yeux.

I got to the end of the story before I'd realized what she'd done. Just as Jake had waited, interviewing the Mariners, Jillian had waited out my first answers so that I would give her a better one.

So that's why I'm such a big fan of storytelling. I think the most important thing is empathy. And it's less about 'those people'. Because I think we're all 'those people'.

In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammed was 'Read.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.

We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.

I love her. Then you do not love the Lord. Yes, I love both of them. You cannot. I do.

I don't know how to answer. I know what to think, but words in the head are like voices under water. They are distorted.

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

She looked at me. There was a second the kind that holds the whole world ...

It is always a mistake to argue with a librarian.