Quotes About Understanding

After all, the only way to communicate is to find someone who can comprehend; the only way to be forgiven is to find someone who is willing to forgive.

You don't make a friend, Jacob said with a scowl. It's not like they come with directions like you'd find on a box of macaroni and cheese.

Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?

When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.

What if what you know isn't what people want to hear?

if i have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over - only living with the mistakes you've made. but then, caleb taught me long ago you can't build anything without some sort of foundation. maybe we learn to live our lives by understanding, firsthand, how not to live them.

She knows the truth can cause a sharp pain behind your eyes and that love sometimes feels like a fist around your throat.

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

I tell them that there is nothing more selfish than trying to change someone's mind because they don't think like you. Just because something is different does not mean it should not be respected.

I have never understood why it is called losing a child. No parent is that careless. We all know exactly where our sons and daughters are; we just don't necessarily want them to be there

I leaned forward and kissed him. And again. As if I were passing him all those silent words I cound not say, the ones that explained my biggest secret: that I might not have OI but I knew how he (Adam) felt. That I was breaking apart, too, all the time.-Amelia

For the first time in my life I begin to understand how a parent my hit a child--it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

What if the one I choose to discount is one who has been truly hurt?

Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.

Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.

Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind. What Mary really runs isn't a bakery, but a community.

Do you know what it's like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you've got nothing left to give- and then realize that it still isn't whay they need?

I think about following her, but I want to give Zoe a minute alone with her mother. I want them to have the shift and redistribution of their relationship that I never got to have with my own mom, that acrobatic feat of love where everything is turned upside down and yet they are both still able to keep their balance.

So you see, this is why I never told my story. If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it. And if you didn't, you will never understand.

When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own.No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

There is something bleak and barren about a world that is missing the person who knows you best.

And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. —KAHLIL GIBRAN The Prophet

After years of seeing the world in absolutes, he has taught me how to pick out all the shades of possibilities.

Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask, 'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.