Quotes About Understanding

Know what the best thing your true love can give you is?" I asked him. "What?" said Dash. "True love.

You don't feel like a stranger to me.   I wanted to ask her, What does a stranger feel like? Not to be snarky or sarcastic. Because I really wanted to know if there was a difference, if there was a way to become truly knowable, if there wasn't always something keeping you a stranger, even to the people you weren't strange to at all. I

If Caroline was here, she'd give me her Patience, grasshopper speech. But she's not and I am left to wonder on my own: How does this work, the getting to know a new guy without revealing too much desperation for his undivided attention?

Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books." "And escape?

I know it won't work and it doesn't work because some things you don't need to hear in order to hear. The mind has an ear of its own and sometimes memory is the fiercest fucking DJ alive.

I mean, what if love isn't a yes-or-no question? It's not either you're in love or you're not. I mean, aren't there different levels? And maybe these things, like words and expectations and whatever, don't go on top of the love. Maybe it's like a map, and they all have their own place, and then when you see it from the sky--whoa.

Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood, or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books.

Wiis? Wiii? What is the plural?)

Because I don't want to," I said. "Not because of the way she is now—I know that's not what she's like. There was no way it was going to be as easy as the notebook. I get that now.

Why do girls always fall for guys with the attention span of drosophila?

You have to understand they're operating from a place of fear, like Fox News viewers.

I feel like I know her. Really know her. And part of really knowing her is also knowing that I don't necessarily know her as well as I think I do. Which is okay. We should each have our own damn souls.

Falling in love should be the easiest thing in the world, but it's not.

I never understood how much responsability came with love.

Do you hear the argument the other side makes?

How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing.

If we looked through the eyes of history, we'd live differently. We'd live right.

She'd never learned to measure out love: give so much, withhold so much.

Here it is. I left this for you. As though an ancient library had breached the border into now, into the life of Aaron Levy, who had not until this moment understood how powerfully he needed something like this. He extended his fingertips. "Wash your hands," Helen snapped from behind him.

When any man of any nation cries out in his wish to know God, then his questions merit considering.

Friendship is a physick all its own, and most especially to those such as we, who through the peculiar paths of our thinking must ever be lonely men.

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.

From a good teacher you may learn the secret of listening. You will never learn the secret of life. You will have to listen for yourself