Quotes About Understanding

So I entered parenting with only 3 clear goals: to love, to cherish, and to listen." - Melissa Ridge Carter

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.

Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other. One can learn from that, he thinks.

I begin to understand you." She nods. "The blacksmith makes his own tools.

The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

He thinks, the cardinal would have known how best to manage this. Wolsey always said, work out what people want, and you might be able to offer it; it is not always what you think, and may be cheap to supply.

So this morning--waking early, brooding on what Liz said last night--he wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.

When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it means to be a king.

Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

The king has great power, but he has no power to know me, except through what I say and what I do.

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.

He is struck by her overview of his situation. It is as if she has understood his life. He is taken by an impulse to clasp her hand and ask her to marry him; even if they did not get on in bed, she seems to have a gift for précis that eludes most of his clerks.

He wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.

So much has been said between them that is is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.

So much has been said between them that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.

Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read, and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

He would have explained, if he'd known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, "I found an easier way to be.

The feeling around his heart—that it is crushed, forced out of shape—he now understands as a deformity caused by grief.

History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past

Give me time," she said mockingly. "That's the anthem of the married man. Give me time while I make my excuses, give me time while I sort out my head. Just another week, just another decade, just till my wife understands. Be reasonable, give me time, just till my children grow up, give me time. And what do you suppose time will give to me?

He understands honor but does not boast of his own. . . He has studied the world without despising it. He understands the world without rejecting it. He has no illusions but he has hopes. He does not sleepwalk through his life. His eyes are open, and his ears for sounds others miss.

I listened to the murmurs within his silence. Construction can be put on silence.

He would like her to shorten her account, but he understands her need to tell it over, moment by moment, to say it out loud. It is like a package of words she is making, to hand to him: this is yours now.