Quotes About Understanding

It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn't seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn't, because it was easier that way for both of you.

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.

In life, perfect pitch is the ability to know someone from the inside out, even better maybe than she knows herself.

A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.

Our eyes meet in the mirror but neither of us speaks; we are afraid that whatever words we pick won't be able to bear the weight of what's happened.

Just because you can't see something, doesn't mean I don't. I can't explain it, I can't understand it, and I can't deny it. So I sure as hell am not gonna fight it.

How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, but as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

She knew how you went about falling in love; she did not know how you went about falling into trust.

But Edward doesn't even flinch; it's as if he's reading the text of me with some magic internal Rosetta stone that makes him understand what I say is not what I mean at all.

Have you ever really held the hand of someone you love? Not just in passing, a loose link between you-but truly clasped, with the pulses of your wrists beating together and your fingers mapping the knuckles and nails like a cartographer learning a country by heart?

It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don't like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn't speak that language. They didn't learn it as children and they didn't manage to pick it up as adults, either.

when you're a point, all you see is the point. When you're a line, all you see is the line and the point. When you're in three dimensions, you see three dimensions and lines and points. Just because we can't see a fourth dimensions doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we haven't reached it yet.

But gender isn't simple, much as some might want it to be. The fact that it's complicated—that there's a whole spectrum of ways of being in the world—is what makes it a blessing.

She was the only one for whom the house didn't have to be cleaned, for whom she didn't have to wear her makeup, and around whom she could say anything without fear of repercussions, or of looking truly stupid.

THE TRUTH and ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Over the years, he's learned empathy the way I might learn Greek, translating an image or situation in the clearinghouse of his mind and trying to attach the appropriate sentiment to it, but never really fluent in the language.

In my opinion, the very fact that Mark doesn't know this diagnostic criterion suggests that he's a lot closer to actual retardation than I am.

Now, I was starting to see that 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.

He could stand pain, himself. He just couldn't stand hers

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

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.

Most of the time, the words that were not written were the ones you needed the most.

He knows what will upset me before it even happens and like a superhero, bends the track of the runaway train before it strikes.

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