Quotes About Understanding

Now I know: Love isn't so straightforward. It's never a matter of telling yourself to do it and doing it. It's never a matter of someone else telling you to do it and doing it. It can't exist between two people if they can't also feel it exist outside of them, too. It can involve hurt, but it shouldn't make you hurt all the time. Then it's not love. It's a trap disguised as love. -Rhiannon

Is that okay?" he asks, backing down a little. "How about Tuesday?" I say. "Wednesday." His seriousness is cracking. "Tuesday and a half." "Tuesday and three-quarters.

It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone else falling with you...

Wherever she is, whatever she's doing – it's not about you. It's about her. And you have to let it be about her. Sometimes we don't want to be found right away. If we step away, it's because we need to be found on our own terms.

One of the towers has fallen. When it's our turn to leave, it's like something in me is finally willing to listen, and suddenly I understand what it means. The tower doesn't exist anymore. Something I've seen my entire life - something so much larger than my entire life - is gone. That is my first reaction. And then I think about all the people inside. There must have been people inside.

Belief. That's what I want for Christmas. Look it up. Maybe there's more meaning there than I understand. Maybe you could explain it to me?

Every kiss that matters contains a recognition at its core.

I wondered if this was how you'd felt. I wondered if I was making myself feel how you'd felt. I knew it wasn't a choice. It was just what my mind was doing. Although I could've been fighting it more.

Time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.

More than anything else, we want to fit into our own families.

She had been lost on her own and I had been lost on my own, so it was natural that once we found each other we wanted to keep being unlost with each other. But that, at heart, had made us exist.

By losing myself to her, I gain her.

Why is it so much easier to talk to a stranger. Why do we feel we need that disconnect to connect?

You don't feel like a stranger to me. I wanted to ask her, What does a stranger feel like? Not to be snarky or sarcastic. Because I really wanted to know if there was a difference, if there was a way to become truly knowable, if there wasn't always something keeping you a stranger, even to the people you weren't strange to at all.

Did I think that by making you rational about one thing, I could make you rational about everything? Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to save you from your fears.

I was daunted by you, and you were daunted by me. The key is to never recognize these imbalances. To not let the dauntingness daunt us.

I'd like to remain at that one delicate remove, so you can get to know me without the distraction of other people's noise.

Elijah, as always, is being unusually kind. While he himself is not lonely, he doesn't mind talking to lonely people. He is the Mother Teresa of banter.

Even though the liquid is easier to see, you have to learn to appreciate the air.

Did it matter that we both drank coffee at night and both happened to go to Barcelona the summer after our senior year? In the long view, was it such a revelation that we were both ticklish and that we both liked dogs more than cats? Really, weren't these facts just placeholders until the long view could truly assert itself? We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favorite color. And this, we figured, had to mean something.

Two sixty-three. Noah tells me. ?!??? I reply.

But whether or not you are here, you are here—because these words are for you, and they wouldn't exist if you weren't here in some way.

I should have felt proud, but instead I felt awful. That I had let him down so many times, that I had been a horrible brother. That he loved me anyway. That maybe he knew more about life than I did, even if I'd had more experience. Because knowing about life is really about knowing how it should be, not just how it is.

We have become—although I'd never say this out loud—something like a model couple. The secret? We like each other. I mean, we really like each other. We know when to keep our space and when to share it.