Quotes About Understanding

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.

In the end, the problem is not so much that people forget, but that they do not always forget the same thing. What still exists as a memory for one person can be irretrievably lost for another, and this creates difficulties, insuperable barriers against understanding.

If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.

you can't punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can't force a child to love you just because he's your child.

He was there for you, and yet at the same time he was inaccessible. You felt there was a secret core in him that could never be penetrated, a mysterious center of hiddenness. To imitate him was somehow to participate in that mystery, but it was also to understand that you could never really know him.

They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.

Would it not be better to learn the truth once and for all instead of living in a state of perpetual uncertainty?

I make no excuse for what happened. Drunkenness is never more than a symptom, not an absolute cause, and I realize that it would be wrong of me to try to defend myself. Nevertheless, there is at least the possibility of an explanation.

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.

Once a man begins to recognize himself in another, he can no longer look on that person as a stranger.

Nadie puede decir de dónde proviene un libro, y menos que nadie la persona que lo escribe. Los libros nacen de la ignorancia , y si continúan viviendo después de escritos es sólo en la medidad en que no pueden entenderse.

El único acto íntimo entre dos extraños que todavía es posible, es el de la lectura

If you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him.

Everything had changed for me, and words that I had never understood before suddenly began to make sense. This came as revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone.

You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget—and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost.

Anger and disappointment could take you just so far, he realized, but without curiosity you were lost.

Öyküler ancak onlar? anlatabilecek olanlar?n ba??ndan geçer demi?ti biri bir gün: Ayn? ?ekilde belki ya?ant?lar da onlar? ya?ayabilecek olanlara sunarlar kendilerini.

Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry's sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy's sadness as his own. Such is the was with dogs.

A book is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy

In spite of his physical efforts, he understands that he is afraid to go on reading the typescript. Why this fear should have taken hold of him is something he cannot account for. It's only words, he tells himself, and since when have words had the power to frighten a man half to death?

Your wife tolerates your weaknesses and does not rant or scold, and if she worries, it is only because she wants you to live forever. You count the reasons why you have held her close to you for so many years, and surely this is one of them, one of the bright stars in the vast constellation of enduring love.

For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition.