Quotes About Understanding

The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language.

I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine.

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.

My mother has often been labelled as strange but that's because she says things that people can't possibly believe. Mostly she's right.

Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

There's this world,' she banged the wall graphically, 'and there's this world,' she thumped her chest. 'If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.

In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge.

Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

En de tijd die zo gestaag en zo zeker voorbijgaat slaat voorbij de klokken op hol. Het kost zo weinig tijd om een leven te veranderen en het kost een heel leven om die verandering te begrijpen.

None can know the human mind. No, not if he read every thought man ever wrote. Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness.

She had navigated her parents' hostile waters with a child's discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. Learning to hide love.

I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices under water.

Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. 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 always the wrong size to fit the template called language.

Didn't they like you? Didn't they, like you, need a heart that was a book with no last page? Turn the leaves.

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

It never happened, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything--the miracle--is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her. I think I do know her now, but it is too late.

I couldn't know her well and yet I did know her well. Not facts and figures, I was endlessly curious about her life, rather a particular trust. That afternoon, it seemed to me I had always been here with Louise, we were familiar.

Most of us can only see the world we know.

How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.