Quotes About Understanding

Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of the subject is, for practical purposes, essential.

Quando gli uomini si trovano di fronte a qualcosa di nuovo che li coglie impreparati, si affannano a cercare le parole per dare un nome all'ignoto, anche quando non possono definirlo né comprenderlo.

It is silent, an anagram for listen. That is what I do. Listen while she remains silent.

loneliness has its own needs!

A great relationship was when someone accepted your past, supported your present, and encouraged your future.

Sex and love are not identical twins. Not fraternal. Not born at the same moment but still of the same womb.

Knowledge enlightens.

the word love has no decent definition!

Eye contact creates wars, creates fights, but eye contact also creates arousal. I felt the weird, pointless tingles, and I read his face and his smile. I tried to look inside him, see what he was feeling, while at the same time guarding myself.

He was old enough to know you can't make people love you. But I suppose when you're wounded, logic ain't logical.

A man knows if he loves a woman in three months, if not three days, but what he desires in three hours, if that is all he desires, he should never get from you in three hundred years.

You haven't been the most affectionate sister I know.

quite often happens that a phenomenon is insignificant only because one fails to take it into account."4 The missing dimension in our current understanding of the heat wave stems precisely from this kind of diagnostic failure.

Narrative is the frame upon which we hang selected swaths of experience in order to construct a shelter of meaning.

A smart person ought to be smart enough to see clearly the limitations of his species.

To know a country you must see it whole.

Never underestimate your listener's intelligence, or overestimate you listener's information.

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst. And speak the truth -- but without malice. Loving candour is the secret of friendship.

Tears are a form of communication - like speech - and require a listener.

I remember everything but forgive anyway.

I had noticed, for example, how all my infatuations dissolved as soon as I really became friends with a man, became sympathetic to his problems, listened to him kvetch about his wife, or ex-wives, his mother, his children. After that I would like him, perhaps even love him—but without passion.

want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Even when we are screaming and throwing things, we are friends. Who is the man and who is the woman? Sometimes neither of us knows. The marriage is androgynous -- like the closest friendships. It will keep.