Quotes About Understanding

She talked, he nodded. She was satisfied. He was oblivious.

I'm not sure a man can ever understand the complicated matter of feminine relationships.

Heath said, cold as ice, cold as a void, so cold it burned her worse than any fire. "Don't you know? Not wanting to and not being able to are not the same things.

Sometimes you love someone who can't give you what you want, so what can you do but love them enough to let them go?

Why do you even put up with me?' 'I'm not putting up with you,' he said, softly. 'I'm loving you.

He always loved her because of, not in sprite of, her flaws.

No emotion is more squirmy than feeling embarrassed for someone else

I hate the very human inclination towards insensitivity

So much of courtship is the unspoken.

All this girl-on-girl hate is exhausting. Sometimes I wish we could dose on testosterone, punch each other in the face, and get it over with already.

I don't know if she's making the right choice, but it's not my choice to make. I promise to support her, whatever she decides. Because that's what sisters do.

We've still got a long haul ahead of is and I don't want to damn her rift away with my first, second, and third impressions, as my character analyses are usually for shit.

Because I know you.

And the two of us eat in silence. But it's not the empty kind of quiet.

The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us.

If you called for nuance, you were part of the problem.

It terrifies me to admit to a firsthand understanding of the way the heart and the ego are entwined. Like diseased trees that have folded in on one another, our need to worship fuses with our need to be worshipped.

When I pointed out to her that he'd like the wedding to include his sister's small children, she told me he had to realize he couldn't always get what he wanted.

I'd get it wrong anyway; everyone who hasn't lived there thirty years or more gets accused of getting it wrong)

On my message boards a recurrent theme was having a partner who didn't help, who didn't get it, who even judged and blamed. Even partners who did help often couldn't feel the wave of need engulfing the ill person. And my god, the need. It felt shameful to need other people so much.

As Virginia Woolf testified in On Being Ill, "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

As Susan Sontag pointedly observes in Illness as Metaphor, illnesses we don't understand are frequently viewed as manifestations of inner states. The less we understand about a disease or a symptom, the more we psychologize, and often stigmatize, it.

our culture tends to psychologize diseases it doesn't yet understand

If medicine can't see or name the problem, it can neither study it nor treat it.