Quotes About Understanding

for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.

Love was a fish factory—love, with all its murk and stink. You had to really love someone to live with him or her in close quarters.

We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need. And maybe the world does not actually need to see you, my dear, reciting a tired old monologue from the Samuel French collection or pretending to be drunk and staggering around. Has that ever occurred to you?

You had to train your mind to remember: human being lying here at my feet, not someone to feel contempt toward.

No one else knew what went on inside you; no one else cared.

People wanted one another to do something. They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else.

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you'd always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely?

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you.

She sometimes said, "I don't know," even when she did know. What she meant was that it was more comfortable to stay in vagueness than to leave it.

the Olympian vantage point that time provides:

They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else. A word might land in a certain way; or maybe not even a word. Maybe a gesture, or a moment of listening.

strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit

Because friend was encompassing, and here it encompassed so much, including the contradictions.

she told me her secret. And showed me what darkness was, and is, and how it works, and how it never goes away or ends.

When you realize, you have no idea what's going on in your kid's head? One morning, you wake up and there's this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They're something else that you don't know.

You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you're left in it.

You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you're left in it.

You looked like you knew a thing or two, she told me later. But were ready to learn a lot more.

When you're in the sciences, when you know about things like neuronal biochemistry and the complex interplay between, say, hormones and emotion, you might imagine you have a deep understanding of the mind. 'Explain to me why I feel this way, think this way, dream this way, am this way.' But consider it: Would you really want to know?

I have another friend who gets what I'm really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

I think she might cry. In her way, she is.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

Impatient men are generous ones. Or haven't you learned that by now?

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.