Quotes About Understanding

We don't have to accept each other's beliefs…but we do have to accept each other's right to believe them.

Whatever your father did was not this woman's fault. And if she made him happy, when I obviously didn't, then the last thing you should be doing is yelling at her.

They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don't realize I am one of them.

You can love a pet more than you love some people. [...] It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

What we could not see clearly, we didn't have to pretend to understand.

Sometimes you have to have the perspective of distance. And sometimes, you cannot tell what you're looking at until it's right under your eye.

I've come to see that ignorance is a privilege, too.

Don't think you have to discuss the illness. Sometimes, a sick person needs a break. And if you ask up front if he wants to talk about how he feels-- or doesn't-- you're giving him control at a time when he doesn't have a lot of choices.

You couldn't argue the facts; you could only change the lens through which you looked at them.

I wonder if it's putting on someone else's skin for a while that she likes so much, or if it's the option of being able to send back a circumstance that just doesn't suit you.

Home isn't a where, Olive. It's a who.

Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and may be never really had.

Neither of us, it turns out, has been the only one who lost someone she loved.

There was a time when I prayed to saints. What I liked about them were their humble beginnings: they were human, once, and so you knew that they just got it in a way Jesus never would. They understood what it meant to have your hopes dashed or your promises broken or you feelings hurt.

In the past, even Alex's promises hadn't prevented a reoccurence. She didn't have a choice. She wished he could see that as clearly as she did.

BEING A MOTHER GIVES YOU a singular sort of vision, a prism through which you can see your child with many different faces all at once. It is the reason you can watch him shatter a ceramic lamp, and still remember him as an angel. Or hold him as he cries, but imagine his smile. Or watch him walk toward you, the size of a man, and see the dimpled skin of an infant.

There's no point in being able to know everything about wolves if you can't teach it to the people who need to learn.

These days it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences.

Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

It was easy to be proud of the kid who got straight A's and who made the winning basket-a kid the world already adored. But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated.

My mother and Joe have a lovers' shorthand, an economy of gestures that comes when you are close enough to someone to speak their language. I wonder if my mother and father ever had that, or if my mother was always just trying to decipher him.

They sat in the companionable awkwardness caused by knowing extremely private things about each other that had never been directly confided.

Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he had been? The