Quotes About Understanding

Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.

Are you always this wise, Ruth?" "Only when it comes to other people's lives.

I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.

Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

it struck me how comfortable I felt with him, as if we were old friends or had already done this many times over, him handing me pages with his heart on his sleeve - he couldn't pretend this work didn't mean everything to him - me reading his words, quietly amazed by what he could do.

What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?

Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?

That was the thing about experience. It took distant strangers and made them a family. A family of one moment. There was no other way to see it, even as we scattered to the wind.

It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it.

We were both straining to bend and compromise for the other. But that was what marriage was about, wasn't it?

My mind knew it was all finished, but the heart never knows, or if it does, it does only at the very last possible moment.

It was possible that all men were difficult to read, but I had to live with Jock through every long

After years of pelting me with advice and restrictions, Emma had nothing left to say now. Nor did I. I could barely remember why I had fought her so much. She seemed just as lost as I was.

Perhaps I will begin by walking where he has walked." Arap

But the loss came with moments of incredible happiness, and the feeling of being seen and understood, of being found. There might be no future, no future at all, but time had sharpened into an unforgettable point. And that was a version of forever. That might be the only version of forever worth reaching for.

What was more exciting than that? I could love him like crazy and work very hard to understand and support him, but I couldn't be fresh eyes and a fresh smile after five years. I couldn't be new.

I don't exactly know, but it feels important to go there. It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it. Everything's changing so fast. I want to believe in something while there's still time. I want to tell the truth, even when it's difficult. And I want to find the story I'm meant to write.

Arap Ruta indeed. I had known him since he wasn't

I had the pure sense that I couldn't ever truly lose the past, or forget what any of it had meant.

How are you?" she asks. The world's most innocuous question, impossible to answer.

The sensitive readers, they have a certain look. You can al. most smell it on them, that they need books to feel okay.

She wouldn't have seen any of the dinginess, because no one ever does until they're on he outside of a place, looking in.

reached behind me to adjust the stockings again. "Your mother doesn't like me." "She just doesn't want to lose me. That's how mothers are.

No one really knows how it is with anyone else. That's the truth. That's our only real retaliation when the gossip starts to churn.