Quotes About Understanding

So we sit, inside our separate skins, and every now and then lean forward to gaze hard at another person and read his or her looks. We ask, 'how's the weather in there?' And if they can answer, if they so choose, we're privileged to share for a brief time what it means to be other than who we are. Might it be that animals share--to varying degrees, inside their varied skins--these same shadowy contents from which love, terror, grief, compassion, and shame spring?

People, even those closest to you, are surprising...Nobody is everything they seem.

These new people were her people. So what that she'd only recently met these women. In their hearts they were all the same: women yearning for rich lives, someone to love & someone to love them in return, friends to laugh with, drink with & cry with.

What is in our hearts is never a one-way street. Only as children when we're too young to understand the signs do we love unrequitedly. If you love, it's because you feel its power reflected back on you.

Avery important change that has yet to be made is the time we transgenders are no longer called 'sex changes'. After all, consider this: we are NOT CHANGING anything! Indeed, we are merely CORRECTING pronouns, names, manner of dress, hormones and less to MATCH what has always been in our brains...

Straight people, like gay or transgendered people, have complex and multifaceted gender identities.

Because it was said that a man had to appreciate beauty in order to know what he is fighting to protect.

Another way to think about metamessages is that they frame a conversation, much as a picture frame provides a context for the images in the picture. Metamessages let you know how to interpret what someone is saying by identifying the activity that is going on: Is this an argument or a chat? Is it helping, advising, or scolding? At the same time, they let you know what position the speaker is assuming in the activity, and what position you are being assigned.

The danger of misinterpretation is greatest, of course, among speakers who actually speak different native tongues, or come from different cultural backgrounds, because cultural difference necessarily implies different assumptions about natural and obvious ways to be polite.

These are the signals that combine with what is said to make up the devices we use to show we're listening, interested, sympathetic, or teasing—and that we're the right sort of people.

This has been one of my biggest surprises in writing this book: the distinction beetween introverts and extraverts did not come up in any of my previous books about relationships, but it emerged early on a significant factor in this one.

the metamessage yields heart meaning.

Our deepest wish is to be understood and approved of by our mothers and our daughters. We can get closer to that goal by listening to the ways we talk to each other, and by learning to talk to each other in new ways.

Smashing heads does not open minds.

A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity--a ratification of one's way of being human and one's way in the world.

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation — or a relationship.

A woman will be inclined to repeat a request that doesn't get a response because she is convinced that her husband would do what she asks, if he only understood that she really wants him to do it. But a man who wants to avoid feeling that he is following orders may instinctively wait before doing what she asked, in order to imagine that he is doing it of his own free will.

Both women and men could benefit from learning each other's styles. Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy, and many men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.

We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.

Knowing that somewhere in the world there is someone who cares what you wore, an insignificant detail of your life that would seem unimportant to anyone else, makes you feel more connected to that person and less alone in the world.

It's important to remember that others' ways of talking to you are partly a reaction to your style, just as your style with them is partly a reaction to their style—with you.

Yet another man commented that women seem to wallow in their problems, wanting to talk about them forever, whereas he and other men want to get them out and be done with them.

Women and men would both do well to learn strategies more typically used by members of the other group— not to switch over entirely, but to have more strategies at their disposal.

He stared at Esmelda with a face like glass, nothing hidden. What I saw there wasn't steel or fire or stone. Feelings stirred in me and I had to look away. I knew what I saw because I'd felt them, too — understanding, sadness, compassion...forgiveness.