Quotes About Understanding

Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.

He learned not to mind the silences.

learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.

By now she has learned that her husband likes his food on the salty side, that his favorite thing about lamb curry is the potatoes, and that he likes to finish his dinner with a small final helping of rice and dal.

Maladies, poorly interpreted, can't be cured.

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words.

Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The

What she'd done for him, because he'd asked.

They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. The

I'm amazed at our impulse to express ourselves, explain ourselves, tell stories to one another.

Men require that you caress them with your expression

Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn't help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistakes, but I'm somehow able to make myself understood. On the page I am alone. The spoken language is a kind of antechamber with respect to the written, which has a stricter, more elusive logic.

I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.

So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.

Le parole sconosciute mi ricordano che c'è tanto che non conosco in questo mondo.

Le parole sconosciute rappresentano un abisso vertiginoso, fecondo. Un abisso che contiene tutto ciò che mi sfugge, tutto il possibile.

Do I remind you of that night?" "Not at all," his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. "You remind me of everything that followed.

Without saying a word to each other we know that, if we chose to, we could venture into something reckless, also pointless.

The only way to even begin to understand language is to love it so much that we allow it to confound us and to torment us to the extent that it threatens to swallow us whole.

And so, instead of saying Ashoke's name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as "Are you listening to me?

Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again.

She'd known him only a few years. Only beginning to discover who he was. But in another way she had known him practically all her life. After his death began the internal knowledge that came from remembering him, still trying to make sense of him. Of both missing and resenting him. Without that there would be nothing to haunt her. No grief.

We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend.