Quotes About Understanding

I'm probably getting too familiar with him, but there's something about him that makes me feel like I would tell him anything. He asks these incredibly direct questions, things that some of my closest friends have never even thought to ask, and I'm inexplicably compelled to share all these deeply personal thoughts. He's like human Xanax or something.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—

It's bad enough to be rebuffed by your daughter—it's worse that it happens right when you feel that she needs you most.

I've come to learn over my years of practice, which is that having a delicate conversation with a teenager is like trying to talk with someone on the other side of a door.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—especially if they have had a particularly close relationship in the past—

if you feel you must criticize your daughter's friends—and sometimes you must—use your words and your tone to communicate that the girls are in a tricky situation, not that they are bad people.

If you really want to help your daughter manage her distress, help her see the difference between complaining and venting.

girls know when they're stepping over a boundary and find it strange when adults seem not to notice.

In good marriages, partners can help their children appreciate what they should and shouldn't take personally in the other parent's behavior. My husband has told our daughters that I've been clean crazy for as long as he's known me and that he stopped taking it personally years ago.

Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that's true even when everything is going just as it should.

People fear what they don't understand.

There is a breed of men out there, you know, who are attracted to strong women. They just don't know what to do once they win us over.

Because sometimes pain is knowing, and sometimes pain is sharing that knowledge with someone who loves you but can't do anything to help.

Everyone deserves a sad day once in a while," Calista told me. "Sometimes things are too big for cheering up. Sometimes the best way to make things better is just to let yourself be sad for a little bit.

Look," I say at last. 'You know me. You know my life. I always thought-or hoped-" "You thought what?" "I just want to be happy," I finally say. She stares at me hard. "You have been," she says.

Even in their brief time together, Nora had come to understand the difference between infatuation and love. Infatuation was weather. Love was climate.

Please don't. We're an ocean apart in who we are, how we look at life, as well as in our hopes and dreams for the future.

eyes, unaware

People try and make out there's a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn't.

You knew I would, didn't you?' She smiles sadly. 'Oh, I don't know, I suppose it occurred to me. I would have said something. Soon. I was on the verge. It just didn't seem like first-date kind of fodder.' 'No,' he says softly. 'I get that.' She turns the mug round and round, not sure where to head next with this development.

softly, "with the little ones. Make it fair." Meg was about to complain but then she took

I will never guilt trip my children when they are adults, she'd vowed. I will never expect more than they are

You're here every night, you join in, but you always seem to be - I don't know - more of a spectator than a participant, as if you are studying us, possibly for some sort of anthropological purpose. Do you even like us?

She remembered the intensity of her desire to undress him, to be naked with him, the way she felt like she could say whatever she wanted and be fully understood and do whatever she wanted and be totally accepted. She remembered how easy it had all been, how open and bright, like being in a whitewashed room with all the windows wide open.