Quotes About Understanding

Grown-ups didn't seem to realize that for me, as for most other schoolboys, it was easier to keep silent than to speak. I was a natural oyster.

The conversation of the gods! - I didn't resent or feel aggrieved because I couldn't understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if I carried messages between them and I couldn't always understand, that was in order too: they were something in a foreign language - star-talk.

Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.

The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn't understand one without the other.

I was a thirty-eight-year-old man, so I had plenty of time to consider the world through the eyes of someone else: yet that someone had rarely been a woman.

We try to reach the heart of God without listening to the Word of God.

I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening. I never learned anything while I was talking.

It doesn't do to sacrifice for people unless they want you to," Clara said. "It's just a waste.

The smartest man alive can't learn much about a woman in two weeks.

He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.

I don't know why you would even want to stay with me, I said. T.R. looked stunned for a second and then whipped her elbow into my side as hard as she could--months later it was determined that the jab cracked a rib. Oh, get fucked! she said, jumping up. No wonder you don't have no girlfriend if you don't have no more feelings than to say a horrible thing like that. All I want to do is love you. Ain't you even gonna let me?

The other men were easy to talk to, but they didn't know anything. If one stopped to think about it, it was depressing how little most men learned in their lifetimes.

Many white men could not trust things unless they could be explained; and yet the most beautiful things, such as the trackless flight of birds, could never be explained.

But then July accepted it and never scolded back, so perhaps that was the way of the world: women scolded, and men kept quiet and stayed out of the way as much as possible.

Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity—they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits.

It ain't a mistake to behave like a human being once in a while

It was only the thought that Deets was still knowing him, somehow, that kept him from feeling totally alone.

You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we're a perfect match, as long as we don't hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.

It's just that it's fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.

He didn't understand why women had such a need to question. He himself preferred just to let life happen, and act when opportunity arose.

He gathers information that we can't see, and puts it together.

He doesn't talk much, though, she added. I don't care whether he talks or not, Lorena said. I wouldn't marry a man just for conversation. I'd rather read and having to know how than listen to some man talk.

She sighed. Men were a pain.

It doesn't do to sacrifice for people unless they want you to.