Quotes about Understanding

There is an important difference between openness and naïveté. Not everyone has good intentions nor means me well. I remind myself I do not need to change these people, only recognize who they are.

Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other.

Toni did not speak English and I didn't speak Russian, but I felt as if we were making love that last night through our interpreters. I still don't know if she knew what was going on or not, but I suspect that she did.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.

There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises.

He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.

I'll listen if you want me to... But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don't mind that, I don't mind listening.

it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words.

Why were you happier when you were a kid? Because you didn't know anything. The more you know, the sadder you get.

A blind person could make a lifelong study of the eye, properties of light, the sight process and become a great expert in the field, but in another sense he would know nothing about sight. A person could know a great deal about God and yet not know God.