Quotes About Understanding

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

Write down what I think I know. The knowing will come. Just keep listening...

And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.

That's why I don't buy it when people say children don't know. That they're too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life—crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can't tell me all of it's not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.

The sign for believe flashed into my head—the way Sean signed it—his pointer finger against the side of his head like he's saying "think," then his hands coming together—like the sign for marry. I stood there thinking, for the first time, about how perfect that word was—to have a thought in your head and then to marry it, to take it into your heart forever . . . "I can't believe

Do you remember . . . ? someone's always asking and someone always does.

And sometimes,' Anne said softly, 'there's just plain love, Ellie. no reason for it, no need to explain' Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee and grinned. 'Perfect love,' she said. 'And what's that like?' 'When you find it, lil sis. You'll know.

My sister's clear soft voice opens up the world to me. I lean in so hungry for it.

Stories can be windows, but also mirrors.

I should have known that sometimes common sense skips a generation.

Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.

What's the thing, I ask her, that would make people want to live together? People have to want it, that's all.

Jacqueline Woodson

And when we pressed our heads to each other's hearts how did we not hear Carmen McRae singing? In Angela's fisted hands, Billie Holiday staggered past us and we didn't know her name. Nina Simone told us how beautiful we were and we didn't hear her voice.

We watched them dip-walk away, too young to know how to respond. The four of us together weren't something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.

Iris didn't understand his happiness. How this was so absolutely enough for him.

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame - of everything.

People are so caught up in trying to force their own world onto everybody else's that they don't even get the fact that the other person doesn't care.

Once I asked Miah if he ever forgot he was black. No. I never forget, he said. But sometimes it doesn't matter-like I just am. Then he asked me if I ever forgot I was white. Sometimes, I said. And when you're forgetting, what color are you? No color. Then Miah looked away from me and said, We're different that way.

Trust me, it takes talent to converse with a cat

Thank you," she murmured a few minutes after their breathing had normalized. "For what?" he laughed, tilting his chin to his chest so he could see her face as he pushed back the half ton of hair that had obscured it. "For answering my question.

I am smart enough to realize that people are the most trying creatures on earth and we drain energy from one another in wasteful useless ways and that would make those who need that energy from you pay a price.

Friendship for me is made from a tapestry of personalities, each of whom shares a part of all I care about.

The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.