Quotes About Understanding

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely.

Time is the school in which we learn.

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see,we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying. It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight. He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.

De ce trebuie s? ai mereu dreptate, îmi spunea el. N-a înÈ›eles vreodat? c? în mintea mea n-aveam niciodat? dreptate.

In fact I did not need to look, nor could I avoid them by not looking: I knew them by heart.

Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in you eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

She didn't know the songs, I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience.

Manau der?t? bent jau linktel?ti žmon?ms, kuriais kadaise buvome,- ir nesvarbu, maloni mums j? draugija ar ne.

They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as "anecdotal".

Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

Anthony Lewis had written in The New York Times in September of 1975, "only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.

I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled.

History is context.

It is hard to remember what we came to remember.

All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.