Quotes About Understanding

I believe in a different kind of magic. The kind we make between each other.

By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.

The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.

Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.

I have sincerely tried not to deride the action of men, not to lament nor to abhor them. I have done all in my might to understand them.- Spinoza

For a large part of what I know about people and things I have to thank an art of listening which wise teachers taught me early.

I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?

Discomfort begets discomfort in others.

I think that's the biggest favor you can grant anyone, don't you? Permission to be dull. I know Henry will sometimes say something so utterly uninteresting that I could faint. And that's when you know you're in love; the tedium isn't unbearable, it's lovely.

We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.

Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]

I'd get this, I luuuuuuuv you, buddy! stuff, and I'd just look at him like, Who are you talking to, guy? What does that mean, your dad 'loves' you and hasn't a [bleep]ing clue who you are? What's he love then? Some kid in Happy Days. Not me.

Only in retrospect do I appreciate that this "doing your bit" is a deadly misapprehension of the nature of familial ties. Better understanding them now, I find blood relationships rather frightening. What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you.

Food was a responsibility, a ward she was determined to go by, ... She'd force herself through to the last forkful even to the point of nausea, because she didn't understand that it was there for her and not the other way round.

Is it called naiveté when you're naïve in purpose?

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least -Erma Bombeck

The word love was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupcons of resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people whom you cared for in your life.