Trying Hard To Understand Quotes & Sayings

I am trying to get folks outside the hip-hop culture to understand why, despite the negatives, young people find hope and refuge in hip-hop. I'm hoping that young people immersed in the culture will work harder to capitalize on the possibilities for great social change that hip-hop represents as a national unified cultural youth movement. — Bakari Kitwana

It's also hard for me to understand growing up not knowing where I came from. I searched for my parents - I started when I was twenty; I found both my mother and my father when I was twenty-two. Trying to catch up on twenty-two years that we can never get back, trying to reconcile that - that's a hard thing for me. — Michael Franti

If you understand real practice, then archery or other activities can be zen. If you don't understand how to practice archery in its true sense, then even though you practice very hard, what you acquire is just technique. It won't help you through and through. Perhaps you can hit the mark without trying, but without a bow and arrow you cannot do anything. If you understand the point of practice, then even without a bow and arrow the archery will help you. How you get that kind of power or ability is only through right practice. — Shunryu Suzuki

As a good girl, my worship was small and my service was toxic because I didn't understand the completeness of my rescue. I knew I was going to heaven when I died, but I thought my life on earth was all up to me. Jesus saved me, and now he was standing back with his arms crossed, waiting to see how I would live my life. Service seemed a burden. Worship felt contrived. I had received Christ by faith for my salvation, but I was working hard for the rest. Until he said *enough*. When I began to understand that my true identity was not in how I looked, how I felt, or the lies I believed, my masks began to lose their staying power. It wasn't because I was trying hard to remove them. It was because I was seeing Jesus for who he really is, and in turn I was letting him see me. — Emily P. Freeman

Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it. — Andre Dubus

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you're overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can't understand them for the life of you, even though you've tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you're the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don't have to tell me your name. You don't have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you're finding life to be the one thing that's trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back. — Henry Rollins

There's something to that in both directions," said Ekaterin mildly. "Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It's so infuriating. It took me the longest time to figure out how to stop falling into that trap."
"Yes, exactly," said Kareen eagerly. "You understand! So - how did you make them stop?"
"You can't make them - whoever your particular them is - do anything, really," said Ekaterin slowly. "Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste ... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just ... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that's hard. — Lois McMaster Bujold

A cord of three strands is not quickly broken (Ecclesiastes 4:12). Obeying God is too hard. Trying to understand, and obey, the Scriptures will break you. If you go it alone. — Ben Reed

If only, I thought, I could talk to Eugene just one more time. This was before I came to understand that you cannot make someone fall in love with you But here's what you can do. By arguing and pleading and screaming and crying and throwing plates and phoning a lot and bringing hot food and sending flowers and buying gifts and doing unsolicited favors and remembering a birthday and being nice and declaring your abiding love and trying hard or sometimes merely by being present, you can make someone who was hitherto lukewarm really detest you. — Patricia Marx

It wasn't that I didn't understand it, this jealousy, because I did. It's just that it was hard sometimes to watch a group of grown people act like seventh graders trying to sit next to the coolest kid at the lunch table. Honestly, it just made you feel sad because you always thought people would outgrow this, thought that adulthood would be different. And it wasn't. — Jennifer Close

Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. Once I'd enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. — Jonathan Lethem

He couldn't understand how I could be so bright in my other classes and a total failure in his. I must not be trying hard enough, he told me. In truth, I didn't care, and I didn't want to care. Geometric shapes with their dangerously sharp angles seemed the mortal enemies of words, and formulas were written in a hostage-taking language that made me despair of ever freeing the words from their captors. The best I could do was to avoid the enemy and save myself. — Thom Satterlee

I don't understand death. For that matter, I don't really understand life. You live. You suffer. You die. It hardly seems worth doing. Yet, here I am, robotically taking a fresh breath every few seconds, standing in this awkward brown and orange polyester waitress uniform, pretending to listen to Mr. Chester go on about his bunions for the second time this week, pouring the evening's thirty-second cup of coffee and trying so hard to put the events of the last four weeks behind me. — C.A. Deyton

Life is so freaking hard. How do people do it? How do people get up every day and deal with the shit? It really makes you understand why there are so many messed-up people in the world. I mean, it's tough, trying to deal with demands coming at you from all sides. — Lisa Schroeder

We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass, blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don't even know what it is, or what it's for. Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand. I touch the hazelnut bush gently as I pass. — Mary Gaitskill

I just don't understand why you're trying so hard. It was really a long time ago."
"Because, when I was nineteen years old, I fell in love with a girl who changed my life by showing me that even the darkest nights still had stars and it didn't matter one bit that you had to lie in the weeds to see them. We were kids and I barely knew her, but I loved her. I should have been there while she grew up, but I was a fool. Now, I have the woman back and I have every intention of making her fall in love with me again, and this time ...I'm never letting go. — Aly Martinez

I can understand how hard it is. Being a tiny lamb and trying to survive among hungry wolves. — M.F. Moonzajer

He comes into my city, he throws away my people, he orders me around like I'm his servant and now this? How dare he!"
I sighed. "How dare he!" came out. Could "Does he know who I am?" be far behind?
"I'm not some illiterate he can push around. I won't be treated this way. I worked too damn hard, for years. Years! Years of study and that fucking Neanderthal comes in and waves his arms." Ghastek skewed his face into a grimace. He was probably aiming to impersonate Hugh, but he mostly succeeded in looking extremely constipated. "Ooo, I'm Hugh d'Ambray, I'm starting a war!"
Laughing right now was a really bad idea. I had to conserve the energy.
"A war I've been trying years to avoid. Years!"
He kept saying that.
"Does he think it's easy to negotiate with violent lunatics, who can't understand elementary concepts?"
Good to know where we stood with him. — Ilona Andrews

People always want to know how you know. And knowing in your heart is very hard to describe. I think so often, we're trying to understand something with our mind. But, actually, the Bible teaches us that much of what God does in our life will be difficult to understand with the mind. — Joyce Meyer

I read once that a third of all gay kids try to kill themselves. They say it's because being gay is so hard in this world. They say that we won't stop trying to kill ourselves until more people understand us, and until we live in a world where it's okay for a guy to love another guy. That's probably true. But there will never be a world where it's okay to fall in love with your best friend's boyfriend. — Michael Thomas Ford

Jargon is making it increasingly hard to understand what a public figure is actually trying to say — Don Watson

What the Secretary of Agriculture is trying to do is to teach the farmer corn acreage control, and the hogs birth control, and one is just as hard to make understand it as the other. — Will Rogers

I'm reading,' said Bruno. 'What are you reading?' she asked him, and rather than answer he simply turned the cover towards her so she could see for herself. She made a raspberry sound through her lips and some of her spit landed on Bruno's face. 'Boring,' she said in a sing-song voice. 'It's not boring at all,' said Bruno. 'It's an adventure. It's better than dolls, that's for sure.' Gretel didn't rise to the bait on that one. 'What are you doing?' she repeated, irritating Bruno even further. 'I told you, I'm trying to read,' he said in a grumpy voice. 'If some people would just let me.' 'I've got nothing to do,' she replied. 'I hate the rain.' Bruno found this hard to understand. It wasn't as if she ever did anything anyway, unlike him, who had adventures and — John Boyne

It's more than words & somehow more than actions could ever show. It's hard to explicate this feeling I have for you, but it's one I could live out the rest of my days trying to make you understand. — David Reeves

Don't be so hard on yourself, You're doing the same thing, trying to reconcile all the moms that Mom ever was - The one you wanted, the one she was when you needed her and she was there, the one she was when she didn't understand. Most of us don't live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we're a whole bunch of selves. When someone dies, they all integrate into the soul - the essence of who we are, beyond the different faces we wear throughout our lives. You're just hating the selves you've always hated, and loving the ones you've always loved. It's bound to mess you up. — Christopher Moore

I move on as quickly as possible. I tend to be really hard on myself anyway, which is great for work ethic and such, but sometimes outcomes are just out of your control and there was nothing you could've done anyway. If I'm at fault, I make note and do my best to try again. "No" isn't really a word I understand. — Ashley Rickards

Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others. — Jacob M. Braude

I never meet a church that wishes they didn't do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn't do it. They will all say, to the person, it's hard. It's difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you're trying to go across cultures, and you don't understand, you didn't mean to offend somebody but you've offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something. — Michael Emerson

Let the world unfold without always attempting to figure it all out. Let relationships just be, since everything is going to stretch out in Divine order. Don't try so hard to make something work - simply allow. Don't always toil at trying to understand your mate, your children, your parents, your boss, or anyone else because the Tao is working at all times. — Wayne Dyer

We have three kinds of guys on our team. We have guys that get it; they play good; they understand how to play winning football. We have some guys that are trying to get it, and they are working hard every day? We are supporting them, and we want the guys that have it to support them. Then we have some guys that don't get it and don't know that they don't get it. We are trying to replace them. We only have a couple left. — Nick Saban

Before I sleep I normally lie awake and think of the future. I've resolved I can't understand life the way I can understand an equation or formula. For so long I've wanted to find concrete answers or die trying. It's hard at first to find comfort in not knowing or to make peace with it. But I think it is the only way to make it in this life. Getting stuck on a question only makes me estranged from the world. — Shane Crash

You have no idea how hard this is for me, but ... maybe, this isn't the right time. Not now, in a vampire tower ... with them all around." He opened his eyes, giving me a pleading look. "Do you understand ... what I'm trying to say?"
I smiled. "You're turning red, did you know that?"
"Allie!" Zeke blew out his breath in a huff. I laughed, released him and stepped back. — Julie Kagawa

Understand, it's never been easy to live,
when we're trying to escape ourselves. — Kelli Russell Agodon

Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life
and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently good=tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we're sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion
to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it. — Gretchen Rubin

Chronicler picked up his pen, but before he could dip it, Kvothe held up a hand. Let me say one thing before I start. I've told stories in the past, painted pictures with words, told hard lies and harder truths. Once, I sang colors to a blind man. Seven hours I played, but at the end he said he saw them, green and red and gold. That, I think, was easier than this. Trying to make you understand her with nothing more than words. You have never seen her, never heard her voice. You cannot know. — Patrick Rothfuss

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand. — Carol Rifka Brunt

The best advice I can give anybody is to try to understand who you are and what you want to do, and don't be afraid to go down that road and do whatever it takes and work as hard as you have to work to achieve that. — Sally Ride

I understand that you come from a generation of women who had to work hard to be heard, but for you to impugn my feminism and act as though I'm a scourge upon women everywhere, just because I refuse to spread your particular agenda? That's dark, and it's not what you fought for. If you continue this way, you're worse than they are (they = men). We are all just trying to get by. There is room for all of us. — Lena Dunham

Listen, Harper. I realize how hard this is for you.
A flash of anger heats up in my chest. She doesn't understand. She can't. If she did, she'd leave me alone instead of trying to force me to talk about this. — Hannah Harrington

If I'm not playing well, I do get down on myself because I am a perfectionist. [So I need] someone who believes in me more than I believe in me, someone willing to work as hard as I work. I don't understand what no means or what failure means; I only understand what yes means and try again means. — Serena Williams

begins. Like Adam and Eve, you don't really understand your true identity. The enemy knows that as long as he can keep you away from understanding who you truly are, then you will continue to work really hard all of your life to somehow reach the same reality of the Garden. Yet all along, even though you don't realize it, what you are trying to reach outside is already within you. — Pablo Giacopelli

Why am I feeling guilty? Why is he so mad? I peek up at him. "Well, you know a lot more about me now," he snaps, his mouth presses into a hard line. "I knew you were inexperienced, but a virgin!" He says it like it's a really dirty word. "Hell, Ana, I just showed you ... " he groans. "May God forgive me. Have you ever been kissed, apart from by me?" "Of course I have." I try my best to look affronted. Okay ... maybe twice. "And a nice young man hasn't swept you off your feet? I just don't understand. You're twenty-one, nearly twenty-two. You're beautiful." He runs his hand through his hair again. Beautiful. I flush with pleasure. Christian Grey thinks I'm beautiful. I knot my fingers together, staring at them hard, trying to conceal my goofy grin. — E.L. James

So what can I do now?" she spoke up a minute later.
"Nothing," I said. "Just think about what comes before words. You owe that to the dead. As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself. Is that too much to ask?"
"A little," she said, trying to smile.
"Well, of course it is," I said, trying to smile too.
"I doubt that this makes sense to most people. But I think I'm right. People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if posible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies. Personally, I don't buy it."
Yuki leaned against the car door. "But that's real hard, isn't it?" she said.
"Real hard," I said. "But it's worth trying for. — Haruki Murakami

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy. — Fredrik Backman

The first order of things to be changed is me, the leader. After I consider how hard it is to change myself, then I will understand the challenge of trying to change others. This is the ultimate test of leadership. — John C. Maxwell