Quotes About Insight

Never judge a book by its cover, especially when the book is a person, was the lesson.

Keegi ei ole nii pime kui see, kes ei taha näha.

If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.

Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven't I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently?

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. James Wood, How Fiction Works As

The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.

for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied.

Pollock once paid a fortune for a Picasso drawing, then erased it in order to see how it was made.

Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

He said, My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a caul over her head like a wedding veil, and I come into this world wearing that same veil. I see what others don't. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.

Not knaves, fools.

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

The world in which the kestrel moves, the world that it sees, is, and always will be, entirely beyond us. That there are such worlds all around us is an essential feature of our world.

To learn all that a horse could teach was a world of knowledge, but only a beginning. Look into a horse's eye and you instantly know if you can trust him.

Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation.

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be gone. [ Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver ( O Magazine , March 2011)]

But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.

Because there is no substitute for vigorous and exact description, I would like to say how your eyes, at twilight, reflect, at the same time, the beauty of the world, and its crimes.

If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more.

To understand many things you must reach out of your own condition.

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me.

I'm older than I used to be, and therefore I understand things nobody would think of who's young and in a hurry.

Whatever you know about here it doesn't tell you

Whatever can't be taught, there is a great deal that can, and must, be learned.