Quotes About Understanding

Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.

You don't realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?

It's that moment about two months in, when you think you've finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It's a delusion – you've only been there eight weeks – and it's followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be.

Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our "progress", so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.

For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around each other's brain.

I'm both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person.

That night at Gertie's when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn't say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn't know the difference then.

The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. But it's hard to know what to say next.

We're always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity.

She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense.

Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.

Who are we and were are we going? Why are we, with all our "progress" so limited in understanding and sympathy and the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages?

Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, 'Your typing makes my brain work batter,' I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work.

This was the way it was with Marc. His heart had a narrow field of vision. I knew it held a great many things, but the aperture was small and I had to wait my turn to be rotated back around into the light where I would glow so brightly I'd be all he could see.

I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall.

Americans could surprise you with the things they knew.

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. you have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. you then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing (Pg.79)

the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.