Quotes About Understanding

You told me, just now, just today, that you'd rather be dead than have to go through this much longer. I take that seriously. I don't think your suffering is fake. I don't think these feelings about wanting it to end are fake. I don't think your self-hatred is fake. So why do you think it's fake?

I just want the world to make sense now and then, is that so wrong?

Sometimes the people don't know what's best for them, Ivan," she says. "Sometimes the people have to be convinced of things that are necessary. That's what leadership is. Not shouting your head off in support of their every whim.

They're weak and strong and they make mistakes, like anyone, like he has. And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there's room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more. More and more and more. Sometimes

Give him numbers, he's great. Give him words and sentences to put together and his forehead creases down so you can see exactly what he'll look like when he's eighty.

A little knowledge could be a large comfort.

Honestly. Adults. How do they live in the world? (Or maybe that is how they live in the world.)

That's the secret of this planet, Todd. Communication, real and open, so we can finally understand each other for once.

There are worse things than being invisible, the monster had said, and it was right.

Poo, Todd! Poo!

We share our craziness, our neuroses, our little bit of screwed-up-ness that comes from our family. We share it. And it feels like love.

There are worse things that being invisible, the monster had said, and it was right.

And by being possessed, you possess, because that's how love works.

Oh, poor little Seth, with his poor little parents who didn't love him. You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there's always more than this. There's always something you don't know. Maybe your parents didn't love you enough, and that sucks, yes, it does, but maybe it wasn't because you were bad. Maybe it was just because the worst thing in the world had happened to them and they weren't able to deal with it.

Say you were standing on a hilltop with someone who had no Noise. Would it be like you were alone there? How would you share it? Would you want to? I mean, here we are, the girl and I, heading outta danger and into the unknown and there's no Noise overlapping us, nothing to tell us what the other's thinking. Is that how it's sposed to be?

She was reading a book on his pad, he saw, her strange attraction to the written words of his people still unabated, still amazed at how anyone could pack so much of themselves into lines on a page. It was a reduction, as she saw it, when expansion seemed so much more natural. And yet here she was again, spending time decoding a language not her own.

Noise ain't truth,

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say. About anything.

He said enough to bring me walking, the monster said. I know injustice when I see it.

But guessing a thing ain't knowing a thing.

Men and their Noise. I don't know how they do it, how they stand each other

People ask for what they need in different ways. Sometimes by not even asking for it at all

So the thing to remember, the thing that's most important of all that I might say in this here telling of things is that Noise ain't truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there's a difference twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don't watch out.

We don't say nothing more. What else is there to say? Everything and nothing. You can't say everything, so you don't say nothing.