Quotes About Understanding

Those who have suffered understand suffering and thereby extend their hand.

Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.

And when we went home he was unnaturally quiet and looked at me as if he wanted to convey all he was feeling without words.

Mommy, I said aloud, and I thought of her suddenly stopping what she was doing, often in the center of the kitchen, and invoking her own mother whom she lost when she was eleven years old. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone?

We didn't have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.

Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone? (P.92)

Nobody sees as we do, Patti

I can examine how, but not why, I wrote what I did, or why I had so perversely deviated from my original path. Can one, tracking and successfully collaring a criminal, truly comprehend the criminal mind? Can we truly separate the how and the why?

A language without words, where the mind must bow to instinct

Da lui ho imparato che la contraddizione è spesso la più limpida forma di verità

If I've learned one thing in life, it's not to be so judgmental of other people.

He had told me I had nothing to worry about, but in the end I did. Yet I understood why he couldn't tell me. I think having to define his impulses and confine his identity in terms of sexuality was foreign to him. His drives toward men were consuming but I never felt loved any less. It wasn't easy for him to sever our physical ties, I knew that.

Good and true friends ask what wrong and how your doing.

As historians, our aim is to do our utmost to understand and elucidate past reality. At the same time, in pursuit of this goal, we must use ordering concepts that by definition inevitably introduce an element of distortion. I believe that our task as historians is to choose concepts that combine a maximum of explanatory power with a minimum of distortional effect.

Today we see studies on mentally retarded children as monstrous.

It's not enough to know what all the words mean," he continued. "A good reader starts to see what an entire book is trying to say. And then a good reader will have something to say in return.

Because a person wants to know that there's a person in the world who would do something if they could." She takes a ragged breath. "Even if they can't.

When you try to learn everything about something, you end up learning something about everything.

Elliston-Jones know

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.