Quotes About Understanding

From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.

We pretend that we know our children, because it's easier than admitting the truth--from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers. It's far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it's safer to say you're a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you.

Because hate's just the flip side of love. Like heads and tails on a dime. If you don't know what it feels like to love someone, how would you know what hate is? One can't exist without the other.

You can't blame someone if they honestly don't understand that their reality isn't the same as yours.

How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?

We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.

Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?

Loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself.

You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.

It's never the differences between people that surprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

I know what it's like when the things you believe make you feel like you're on the outside looking in.

They ask, how could this happen here? Well. How could it not happen here?

You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to believe the best about someone if you truly love him

I wish I could tell him I understand: the higher you raise your hopes, the farther you have to fall.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: we take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

be a good listener, don't judge and don't put boundaries on someone else's grief.

People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. —NELSON MANDELA, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

you can love a person and still hate the decisions they've made, can't you?

Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.

In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn't all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they're incapable of saying exactly what it is that's causing pain.

God, what had we done? It didn't really matter. Piper had been the kind of friend with whom I didn't have to fill in the spaces with random conversation. It was okay to just be with her. She knew that sometimes I needed that - to not have to take care of anyone or anything, to simply exist in my own space, adjacent to hers.

Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.

You say you don't see color…but that's all you see. You're so hyperaware of it, and of trying to look like you aren't prejudiced, you can't even understand that when you say race doesn't matter all I hear is you dismissing what I've felt, what I've lived, what it's like to be put down because of the color of my skin.