Quotes About Understanding

It's a totally different spiel when I talk at Morehouse. But when I'm talking at MIT? At the University of Cincinnati? I'm telling white people, in order to stop systemic racism, you must first befriend, become a colleague of, get to know intimately, put yourself culturally in the framework of someone who doesn't look like you.

I think when people are having a hard time, we tend to blame ourselves and think we can do better. Bernie is giving rise to their understanding that this is not an individual problem, this is a systemic problem.

Positioning ourselves, physically and psychologically, on the same plane with our subjects can help us avoid what Gardner refers to as "frigidity" in our writing, one of the "faults of soul" he warns against. Frigidity is coldhearted failure to respond on a deep, human level to the characters and events of our story. Sometimes,

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally," Eliot once wrote. "The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.

Books gave us a way to shape ourselves—to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be.

A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book.

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

Being a mom makes me feel whole and like I understand the meaning of life.

I think to make any relationship work it just takes a tremendous amount of effort and accepting of one another.

A real friend is someone who likes you for who you want to be and not for who they want you to be.

The thing about death is that it takes a while before you realize that it's never going to go away.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.

I think that when you don't know, you should just wait until you do.

Bridge knew why she was here. It's why we're all here, she thought. Call it Mr. Partridge with his black-and-white cookies. Call it Em standing on that stage with her knees shaking but her voice strong. Call it Jamie looking awkward in the doorway of her bedroom after she'd had the mummy nightmare. Call it love.

Thank you for showing me your planet.

Let's say everyone has nine thousand things about themselves," Em had explained to Tab and Bridge in sixth grade, "and say two people fall in love because it seems like all their things match up. But what they don't know is that only like a thousand of their things actually match up. My mom says most people who get married don't even know those other eight thousand things about themselves yet. So it could happen to anyone.

People don't want to think about it.' 'I can see why,' I said. 'It makes my head hurt.' 'Still, you did better than most people. You're a pretty smart kid.' I rolled my eyes. 'Gee, thanks.

He nodded like he felt sorry for me and my stupid brain. 'I think that's probably because of your common sense. You can't accept the idea of arriving before you leave, the idea that every moment is happening at the same time, that it's us who are moving—' Enough was enough.

It's about the kind of love that doesn't ask you to be anyone but who you are.

Belle surprised me. "Well, it's simple to love someone," she said. "But it's hard to know when you need to say it out loud.

Well, it's simple to love someone,' she said. 'But it's hard to know when you need to say it out loud.

Sex can look like love if you don't know what love looks like.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.