Quotes About Understanding

he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, "Yes, dear.

There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn't understand something.

Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

Richard Russo

Later in life, he was fond of remarking, rather ruefully, that he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, "Yes, dear.

Who are you talking to?" "This goose," I assure him. And in fact he looks relieved. "I was afraid you were talking to yourself.

I remember vividly wishing she wouldn't do that, that she'd let him arrange his thoughts and feelings the way he wanted. After all, how does one invalidate a powerful feeling? Not with logic, surely.

It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn't much better.

A man could be surrounded by poetry readings and not know it.

The more he thought about it, life's truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

I write about it not because I understand it, but because I don't.

There are no small lives, there are no small stories, there are no small people.

When someone loves you," she went on, "you don't have to wish for it to be so. You just know it is.

But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

Bottomless need. What Miss Rosa didn't seem to understand was that this accurately described not only most children but also the scared child that lived, at least part of the time, deep inside most adults.

God can pick sense out of a confused prayer. These desires cry louder in his ears than your sins.

If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand.

Cognition begins with sensation.

La teoria redime i fenomeni; è una congettura fortunata.

Astrology," he stated, "represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.

The distinction often seems precarious. Both traveler and tourist are, by definition, separate from their environment. We like to think that the role we aspire to, the traveler, has that distance on the scene that implies vision and understanding, while the tourist suffers the alienation of the passive viewer, the sightseer. At its worst, tourism is felt to represent a moral or spiritual failing. And in our hear we fear that we, too, are tourists.

You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man...

a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.