Quotes About Understanding

Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.

One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

People changed. Even the people you thought you knew as well as you knew yourself.

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.

What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

I don't know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You'd be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused.

And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn't all about me?

That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one

You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.

I know what love is. When you find the person you are supposed to love, bells ring and fireworks go off in your head and you can't find the words to speak and you think about him all the time. When you find the person you are supposed to love, you will know by staring deeply into their eyes.

Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?... Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real

It's crazy, right? To love someone who's hurt you? It's even crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.

You don't love someone because they're perfect, she says. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not. I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.

The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn't disappointed.

I knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first.

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

Well I talk a little about that, but I don't admit that from the beginning I knew we were not meant to be together.

Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, this too shall pass - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

Love has nothing to do with what you're looking at and everything to do with who's looking.