Quotes About Understanding

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else's tragedy - but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you.

I understand now that desperate, clumsy desire to make people feel better—even when you know perfectly well that nothing will.

It wasn't logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear.

It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more 'herself' with her 'true' friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.

But women like Tess didn't seem to have that need to share the ordinary facts of their lives, and that made Cecilia desperate to know them.

Samantha: Parents do tend to judge each other. I don't know why. Maybe because none of us really know what we're doing? And I guess that can sometimes lead to conflict. Just not normally on this sort of scale.

Abigail is having a 'beautiful experience' with Bonnie at the homeless shelter," Madeline said to Ed. Ed took his pillow off his face. "That's revolting," he said. "I know," said Madeline. This is why she loved him.

That was the secret of a happy marriage. Step away from the rage.

I'm your best friend, Erika," he said sadly. "Don't you know that?

It was one of the best things about him; he liked to talk about people, study them, and work them out. He was interested in the complexities of relationships.

there is nothing more patronizing to an Infertile than to hear a new mother complaining,

Why hadn't that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn't feel like a nag.

It was just a plate, her father kept saying to Christina. He never understood what that plate represented: Disrespect. Disregard. Contempt.

She'd never wanted his gratitude, just his acknowledgment. Just once.

You mustn't take any notice of her,' says Enigma. 'I often sing a little song in my head until she's finished talking.

admit it to her dad, who would just take what she said at face value, rather than her mother, who would listen too intently and empathetically and filter everything through her own emotions.

But then a university friend got diagnosed with depression and described it to Brooke as a kind of half paralysis, as if all her muscles had atrophied, and Brooke had a sudden memory of Amy eating cereal in slow motion, swaying like seaweed under water, and she realized she was offering this friend more sympathy and understanding than she'd ever given her own sister. These days she tried hard to see Amy with objective, compassionate eyes,

I knew there is nothing more patronizing to an Infertile than to hear a new mother complaining, as if that will make you feel better for not having your own baby. It's like telling a blind person, "Oh, sure, you get to see mountains and sunsets, but there are also rubbish dumps and pollution! Terrible!

Every time I ask her to explain her job, I forget to listen.

Jab, jab, truce! This, it seems, is marriage–

Somehow she knew there would be an unspoken truce on their unspoken battle over God knew what when they were old. They could both surrender to their innate grumpiness. It was going to be a lovely relief.

student Rani. "Passive listening is the way he listens to me.

forty being the "precise age where you're old enough and young enough to handle a revelation".

For the first time ever, she saw her mother as just a girl: a girl like her who made mistakes, who screwed things up, who was just making it