Quotes about Understanding
Unless we could recognize one another's reality, I'd argue, we would never solve the problems America faced.
— Barack Obama
I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
— Barack Obama
It's safer knowing more about people than they know about you.
— Barbara Kingsolver
I never learn anything from listening to myself.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them
— Barbara Kingsolver
I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.
— Barbara Kingsolver
What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.
— Barbara Kingsolver
His confidence was enviable and maddening. Most of the time she didn't want him to solve or contradict her worries, she just needed him to listen and agree with her on the awfulness at hand. This was a principle of marriage she'd explained many times.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.
— Barbara Kingsolver
This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.
— Barbara Kingsolver