Quotes About Understanding

A sudden reconfiguration of your past can change the fit and feel of your adulthood. It may cleave you from the mother whose single goal has been your happiness. If your husband has transformed greatly in his own life, he will understand your transformation.

Maybe we shared an impatience with small talk, being a heart surgeon and a drug counselor. The body and its needs: the thing itself.

Later, in bed, she smooths my forehead with her cool hand. "He's had a hard time, Drew," she says. "Is it too much to ask you to be patient with him?" "He's not our son. I don't know him, and neither do you." "He's family," she says. "Isn't that enough?

You will never know how much I understand you.

She was not unique, but neither was she alone. Reading might have saved her.

It's good common sense, your grace.' Mahina shook her head. 'Good sense is far from common, I fear, Tarja.

and spoken my name for the first time.

If you've never experienced a sense of dysphoria with your own body, all I can say is, Lucky you. But just because you have not experienced this yourself does not mean it is not real in the hearts of others.

Maybe we should just love one another, even if we don't completely understand the things that people bear in their dark, strange hearts, even if the stars that other men and women are following seem invisible to us. If we make ourselves open to the humanity of others first, maybe understanding will follow. An incomprehensible theory of the universal isn't necessary if your only ambition is to embrace another soul. What you need, maybe all you need, in fact, is the willingness to love.

It's funny how you can know a person, think of him as your closest friend, and still never gain access to the secret chambers in his heart.

Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved? Why is it that what is so obvious to dogs is such a mystery to men and women?

There are times when I think it's impossible to know another soul. I don't know, maybe we're lucky that way. If we knew what really went on inside other people's private hearts it would make our eyeballs bleed.

Having an opinion about transsexuality is about as useful as having and opinion on blindness. You can think whatever you like about it, but in the end, your friend it still blind and surely deserves to see.

The more we feel compelled to keep explaining ourselves, the less like others we become.

The rule with marriage is the less you talk about it the better, as far as I can tell.

In order to be a good help on someone's journey toward transformation, you need to understand the world as he sees the world, not as you see him.

Sometimes you stop seeing what the person is to the world. You only see what the person is to you.

For years, struggling to raise the daughter she'd expected to have, she had failed to see the one she'd gotten.

It is not your responsibility to explain what God is doing with your life. He has not provided enough information to figure it out. Instead, you are asked to turn loose and let God be God. Therein lies the secret to the "peace that transcends understanding.

Jesus didn't, and we shouldn't. He doesn't need us to stick up for him; he needs us to represent him, to be like him, to look like him and to talk like him, to be with people that he would be with, and to take the side of the "ignorant" instead of those in the "know."[91]

mail-outs. As missionaries have always understood, the key is to study the culture you are passionate about reaching and submerge into that space with respect and love.

The way I saw it, life wasn't always so clear cut as to call one thing a sin and another thing holy. Sometimes, you just had to give people enough space, time, and grace to find their way to safety. Despite whatever mistakes I had made in my own journey toward faith, I couldn't see how forcing the issue upon others did much to speed up the process. Still, it didn't seem to stop some folks from trying.

I understood books. I did not understand boys—especially alien boys.

There was a pause, then his lips stretched into a smile. "You're right." Hell froze over. Pigs were flying. "Come again?" "You're right. I should have checked in at some point. I'm sorry." The world was flat. I didn't know what to say. According to Daemon, he was right about 99 percent of the time. Wow.