Quotes About Understanding

Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.

He listens. He breathes into the phone. 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. Your words go scattershot off of it.

Conversations in foreign languages don't linger in my head like they do in English. They don't last.

Helen declared Western civilization's lack of understanding of other peoples' customs to be the world's greatest and gravest social problem.

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 that moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

She seemed amused, entirely uninterested in changing him. He knew it was like that at first with anyone. He also knew it might mean that she didn't care about him at all.

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 that moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

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.

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. Your words go scattershot off of it.

I tell them one of our dishwashers is from Guayaquil, and they want to meet him. I get Alejandro, and he ends up sitting and smoking with them, talking about politics and grinning madly, and I get a glimpse of who he is when he isn't engulfed in spray and steam and food waste.

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.

She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. 'We're always, in everything we do in this world,' she said, 'limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl.

WordsWorth. Darkness Visible

And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. 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. 1/13

We're always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl.

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 spend enough time at the racetrack, you know your horse, okay? You always know your horse.

But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She wanted his real one. What would he say about it all? She could imagine writing a whole book on him alone.

If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

Sometimes I think we'd be better off blind.

Nobody is right and nobody is wrong. Only one thing is right, and that is the Truth, but nobody knows what it is. It is a thing that changes all the time, and then comes back to the same thing. -Old Yao