Quotes About Understanding

I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. "You

Back then, we were all still willing to take the "risk," if "risk" is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality.

The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.

He'd turned to me, red-faced, and asked: 'If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?

She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance.

Il romanzo e' una strada a due sensi dove la fatica che si richiede a entrambe le parti alla fine risulta uguale. Leggere, se lo si fa come si deve, e' difficile tanto quanto scrivere.

But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over.

Sometimes it is when we stop trying to understand or interrogate apparently 'absurd' phenomena - like the category of the 'new' in art- that we become more open to them.

It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.

Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully.

This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him.

That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read.

Oh my God — Fern — please! Stop talking like that! I don't want your heart! I don't want to be responsible for anybody else's heart. For anybody else's anything!' He looked confused: 'A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible.

it's a good friend who wakes a friend from her dream

within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends.

within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind that occurs between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends.

But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others.

Well, maybe I use the wrong word in English. I mean that for Lamin the future is as certain as the past.

Don't give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!

Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other's rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them (not so much over the head as between the legs); and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable. Like Garibaldi biscuits.

And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler's Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable.

Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation — as cathartic as it may feel. Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.

Please. Do me this one, great favor, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home—if you, if we, get back to our respective homes—if ever you hear anyone speak of the East," and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, "hold your judgment. If you are told 'they are all this' or 'they do this' or 'their opinions are these,' withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you.