Quotes About Understanding

Look, all I meant is...words are words. They don't matter as much as you think the do. What's important are the emotions behind them" -Josh

Well sometimes things don't make sense right away, so you might as well put them aside and wait until they do" -Mom

Logic doesn't overcome pain.

Sólo un solitario es capaz de estar al lado de otro sin sentir la necesidad, la obligación y el derecho, de poseerlo ni de cambiarlo.

Un pacto tácito de frases hechas encadenadas, palabras que iban llenando el silencio, con el propósito de ni siquiera tener que hablar del silencio.

Creo que cada uno de nosotros llega a la verdad que puede tolerar. Y, parado allí, no se atreve a dar otro paso. Es un límite que pone nuestro propio instinto de conservación.

you only know something once you've experienced it in your life, life is our greatest test.

Así sucede con los grandes personajes de la literatura, siempre encontramos un punto, una arista, un gesto donde podemos ser ellos.

Así sucede con los grandes personajes de la literatura, siempre encontramos un punto, una arista, un gesto donde podemos ser ellos. O al menos podemos ponernos en su lugar.

Cuando descubrí lo que era coger le pregunté a mi madre, con la sorpresa, la inocencia y el espanto de la infancia, si eso que me habían dicho mis amigas era cierto, si de verdad las mujeres debían dejar que los hombres «metieran su pito» dentro de una. Mi madre me miró, se tomó un instante y luego dijo: «No lo pienses así, es como cuando uno tiene hambre y come, o tiene sed y toma agua». No mencionó el amor. Ni siquiera los hijos por venir.

Éste es mi último acto de dignidad, reconocer mi error: el daño que se puede hacer al otro cuando no lo dejamos elegir más camino que aquel que nosotros creemos correcto.

Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hatred or love.

context is not meaning.

Those who voted in 2016 to be represented yet again by this form of violence, the 62 percent of white men and 47 percent of white women, a plurality, how am I to understand them?

You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with "yes, and" rather than "yes, but.

People feel hurt when you point out the reality that forms experience because the reality is not their emotional experience.

The man doesn't acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn't call it thought.

For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent.

The purpose of art," James Baldwin wrote, "is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers." He might have been channeling Dostoyevsky's statement that "we have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.

It was a lesson.

But I still have questions, and the way to get answers is to bear her corrections.

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only." - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage")

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage' by Tayari Jones)

To converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and the unsaid.