Quotes About Understanding

Only the chicken-lover will understand me. He will give me a kindly look, maybe mildly desirous. His eyes will tell me: You might look a lot better with some reddish-brown feathers.

Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the only thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he reall knew.

We aren't eccentric, we're not bizarre. To each other, we're as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.

Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly understood-threatening.

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

What Brother Pepe saw in Edward Bonshaw was a man who looked like he belonged—like a man who had never felt at home, but who'd suddenly found his place in the scheme of things.

Ah, well... I started to say, and then stopped. So that was where he was going; I'd heard it before. Richard had told me that I'd not been standing in my mother's shoes in 1942, when I was born; he'd said I couldn't, or shouldn't, judge her. It was my not forgiving her that irked him-it was my intolerance of her intolerance that bugged him.

Meaning Michael Milton; meaning the whole thing.

worst of all were the highly unlikely science-fiction novels, or the equally implausible futuristic tales. Couldn't my mom and Nana Victoria see for themselves that I was both mystified and frightened by life on Earth?

As a fourteen-year-old, he'd not been old enough to have sympathy for her—for either the child or the adult that she was.

not simple intolerance but the tolerance of intolerance, which allows the intolerance to persist.

Nana never remembered where you stopped reading, and wherever you started Moby-Dick, Mildred Brewster knew exactly where she was in the story. What my grandmother didn't know was where she was in her own story.

They resembled an elderly, long-married couple—devoted to each other without conversation.

With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer.

A loving couple will say things to each other - you know, Danny - just to make each other feel good about a situation, even if the situation isn't good, or it they shouldn't feel good about i, Ketchum said. A loving couple will make up their own rules, as if these made-up rules were as reliable or counted for as much as the rules everyone else tried to live by - if you know what I mean.

Reading good novels can make young readers seem more experienced about relationships than they are.

You should listen to these people, Farrokh," his father was telling him. "It isn't necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.

You have taught yourself to read English, too," Pepe said slowly to the boy; the girl suddenly gave him the shivers, for no known reason. "English is just a little different—I can understand it," the boy told him

Do not forget the past; forgive the past.

And Juan Diego had selected this particular book because it was in English; he'd wanted more practice reading English, though his less-than-rapt audience (Lupe and Rivera and the disagreeable dog Dirty White) might have understood him better en español.

I know what's fair, Helen said. I also know what's human

You're the biggest secret I know...The only way I know what's going on with you is the only way everyone else knows it. I just have to wait and read your next book.

That poor girl wasn't a girl," Señor Eduardo said; he'd glanced once at Lupe, asleep in his lap, just to be sure she was still sleeping. "That poor girl was Flor

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