Quotes about Understanding

Believe people when they tell you who they are. They know themselves better than you.

People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel. ~ From intro to movie: Spinning Into Butter

I could never put my finger on her realness. She was so pretty and so quick that even when she had just awakened, her eyes full of sleep and hair tousled, I thought she looked just like the Virgin Mary. But what mother and daughter understand each other, or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding? Mother

To be allowed, no, invited into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

I could never put my finger on her realness. She was so pretty and so quick that even when she had just awakened, her eyes full of sleep and hair tousled, I thought she looked just like the Virgin Mary. But what mother and daughter understand each other, or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding?

Take a month and show some kindness for the folks who thought that blindness was an illness that affected eyes alone.

Her husband remains, in my memory, undefined. I lumped him with all the other white men that I had ever seen and tried not to see.

Now no one is going to make you talk--possibly no one can. But bear in mind, language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals

The unsaid words pushed roughly against the thoughts that we had no craft to verbalize, and crowded the room to uneasiness.

Each of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm. When we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.

For centuries we had probed their faces, the angles of their bodies, the sounds of their voices and even their odors. Often our survival had depended upon the accurate reading of a white man's chuckle or the disdainful wave of a white woman's hand. Whites, on the other hand, always knew that no serious penalty threatened them if they misunderstood blacks. Whites were safely isolated from our concerns.