Quotes About Understanding

Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?

We were patient enough to count the hairs on each other's heads, too impatient to get undressed. Neither of us had the upper hand, we wore matching wounds.

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

you act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.

I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder.

Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations.

He had never talked of what he wanted to do, where he was going, he never joined in the aimless conversations that clustered round the idea of something better in another time. He didn't believe in the future, only the present, and as our future, our years, had turned so relentlessly into identical presents, I understood him more.

He's only a dog. Yes but he has found me out.

I have learned what love costs. I never count it but I know what it costs.

Truth is a questioning place.

I say I'm in love with her, what does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly she explains me to myself; like genius she is ignorant of what she does.

It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.

Just as they were driving off on his horrible Iron Curtain motor bike, he patted my arm, told me he knew, and forgave us both. There was only one thing I could do; mustering all my spit, I did it.

Yet as we travel deeper into the strange world of the story, the feeling we get is of being understood - which is odd when you think about it, because at school learning is based on whether or not we understand what we are reading. In fact it is the story (or the poem) that is understanding us. Books read us back to ourselves.

A man needs understanding because he is existentially alone. He stares into the darkness. That was the difference between men and women, Leo thought. Men need groups and gangs and sport and clubs and institutions and women because men know that there is only nothingness and self-doubt. Women were always trying to make a connection, build a relationship. As though one human being could know another.

Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

Some folk say I'm a fool, but there's more to this world than meets the eye.' I waited quietly. '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.

Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.

Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.

Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.

I do not know the art of being clear to those who do not want to be attentive.

If one divided all of human science into two parts - the one common to all men, the other particular to the learned - the latter would be quite small in comparison with the former. But we are hardly aware of what is generally attained, because it is attained without thought and even before the age of reason; because, moreover, learning is noticed only by its differences, and as in algebraic equations, common quantities count for nothing.

The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning.