Quotes About Understanding

Why couldn't two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk—

Why couldn't two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk—real, natural talk, about what they felt, what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope?

They were just cups of acceptance.

Dogs being great linguists, she quickly picked up English, far more quickly than I picked up German, so we understood each other very well, and couche, schönmachen, and pfui continued for a long time to be my whole vocabulary. Fortunately

Why couldn't two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk—real, natural talk, about what they felt, what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope?

even now, after years of study in the art of holding my tongue, some stray fragment of what I feel does occasionally come out, and then I am at once pulled up and brought to my senses by the well-known cold stare of utter incomprehension, or the look of indulgent superiority that awaits any exposure of a feeling not in the least understood.

can never see two people contradicting each other without feeling wretched. Why contradict? Why argue at all? Only one's Best-Beloved, one's Closest and Most Understanding should be contradicted and argued with. How simple to keep quiet with all the rest and agree to everything they say.

always so firmly supposed she did; and it was why

Well, I for one am unable to imagine how anybody who lives with an intelligent and devoted dog can ever be lonely.

One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

You don't need an excuse to be depressed.

If you already know what your response will be before you've heard what the other person has said, you are not listening.

And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.

There are all these things my mother is good for that my father isn't, and all these things my father is good for that my mother isn't, and if only they could work out their differences, or keep the dim of discord to a minimum, I could have two whole parents.

I'm not crying because you're mean. I just can't imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.

He seemed a fool-everyone who didn't feel like me seems a fool.

Negaliu pak?sti minties, kad asmenyb?s raid? ir vis? individuali? savybi? rinkin? galima paaiškinti paprastai tokie buvo laikai.

The best people are the ones you have to forgive for everything. You have no choice; it would be worse to live without them.

He could be good to talk to sometimes, but his actual efforts on my behalf added up to a whole lot of nothing. Every time I realized how little he would actually do for me as a father, how indifferent he was to parenting basics like buying me clothes or getting me to school on time or running me over to dance class, my misery was compounded. I could see that he might have understood me better than my mom did, but he really didn't love me as devotedly.

my gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world.

Books, the books that I loved above all else to spend my time with, were the great tools for understanding one's life and the lives of other people.

When she thinks a book is very good, what she says to herself is: yes, that's how things are. I hadn't thought of it before, but that's how things are.

I studied you until I knew you, or at least, the public parts of you: your learning, your passion, the way your voice slows down when you answer a question. I studied your hands, and wondered how they'd touch me; your hair, and how it would smell. I wondered about that and about the rest of you I could not see. I wanted to know you. And I wanted you to know me. I wanted you to see me.

Presuming that a nonspeaking child has nothing to say is like presuming that an adult without a car has nowhere to go.