Trying To Understand Someone Quotes & Sayings

That word. I would have given anything to hear her say it over the summer, to have had the chance to say it back, but now, more than ever, I understand its true power. How it can make you ache as much as it can make you soar. How it shouldn't be said in return unless you mean it as deeply as the speaker. And that's not something you can ever know. Not truly. There's too much blind faith involved and that word is always, always a risk. You'll get hurt. Or the other person will. You'll stomp on someone's heart without meaning to. Loving is foolish and risky, like trying to raise a building in a bog. Emotions don't make strong foundations. — Erin Bowman

The Dimwit's Guide to the Female Mind might assist your efforts in understanding human females. But it must be pointed out that this subject can be a dangerous adventure and should be undertaken with extreme caution. After all, human males have been trying to understand their females for generations, and most of the time they come away from these encounters looking like someone stuck their tails into an electric socket. — Anne Bishop

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself. — Paulo Coelho

My mother's dying and may not live through the week. So, yes, I'd rather die trying to save her than live with the guilt of wondering if I could have. If you can't understand caring that much for someone you love then you're one coldhearted bastard. (Abbie) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, 'I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it.' — Thomas Powers

People don't want to listen. All they see is someone they think is trying to get a free ride. They don't understand I'm working, I'm not begging. I was actually trying to make a living. Just because I wasn't wearing a suit and a tie and carrying a briefcase or a computer, just because I didn't have a payslip and a P45, it didn't mean that I was freeloading. — James Bowen

NiOptics also was an example of something Doriot had tried to teach me back at Harvard, and it is a lesson I have learned more than once. In venture capital investing, Doriot said, it is important to understand who will buy the technology you're trying to sell. It is easy to fall in love with technology and lose sight of the fact that someone at some point will have to pay for it. An investor can lose a lot of money that way, and we have not been immune to such temptations. — Robert Finkel

You can waste a perfectly good life trying to meet the standards of someone who thinks you're not good enough because they can't understand who you are. — Barbara Sher

It was difficult for me to understand that, when you're kind to someone in a big city, a lot of the time, they think that you want something. I didn't understand that, all of a sudden, niceness meant that you were trying to get something out of somebody. — Jaime King

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

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society ... Writing is today's currency for good ideas. — Jason Fried

Zulu!" I raced up to his side and stopped him. "I can explain my weird behavior."
"So you're not just crazy?" His blond eyebrows rose as he grinned.
"Well, that's the point. I am crazy." I raked my fingers through my hair and blew out a long breath. "I set my ex-boyfriend and the two women he was cheating with on fire. They were all in the hospital for several months."
He didn't say anything and just continued to stare.
Feel like running away yet?
"So," I said. "I'm not the sanest person you could spend your time trying to be with."
He flashed me a huge smile. "If someone touched you now, they would be lucky to have only one month in the hospital."
Oh, my goodness.
"Okay. I don't think you understand me." I held my hands out to my sides. "What I am trying to say is I'm insanely jealous and act on it in violent ways that are frankly detrimental - "
"You have a few more weeks." He tapped his watch. "And then I'm coming for you."
Coming for me? — Kenya Wright

Look, tiny - i'm trying to be on my best behavior, but you have to understand - i'm always standing on the edge of something bad. and sometimes someone like you can make me look the other way, so that i don't know how close i am to falling over. but i always end up turning my head. always. — David Levithan

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

The most compassionate and peaceful thing you can do for yourself and others is to let go of the past, let go of the anger, let go of trying to hurt people that wronged you. There are thousands of people dying from cancer that wish they had someone to care about them and be with them during their final days. There are children being sold into sex trafficking and are hoping someone would rescue them. There are homeless people that wish they had something warm to wear or eat. There is an entire species being wiped out because not enough people care about our oceans. Today, remember that there is someone praying for the very things you take for granted. Spend your effort where God needs you to be
on the front lines of the war on earth, not on the battlefields of the past. — Shannon L. Alder

Philosophical argument, trying to get someone to believe something whether he wants to believe it or not, is not, I have held, a nice way to behave towards someone; also it does not fit the original motivation for studying or entering philosophy. That motivation is puzzlement, curiousity, a desire to understand, not a desire to produce uniformity of belief. Most people do not want to become thought-police. The philosophical goal of explanation rather than proof not only is morally better, it is more in accord with one's philosophical motivation. — Robert Nozick

Live a real experience of love is one of the greatest pleasures of life. It feels like the soul, but to express the feelings depends on the ideas of each. Constrain the love of our neurotic needs and we with him. Live a life trying to make others take responsibility for our needs as we recklessly abandon.

We want to be loved and not love, we want to be understood and we do not understand, we want the support of others and we give our them. When we abandon ourselves, we want to find someone who will fill the hole that we dug. The dissatisfaction, emptiness turn on continual search for new relationships, the results will be repeated frustrating.

Each is solely responsible for their own purposes. Only those who can find love in your life One Love Truth
— Zibia Gasparetto

If you flinch," Four says, slowly, carefully. "Al takes your place. Understand?" I nod. Four's eyes are still on mine when he lifts his hand, pulls his elbow back, and throws the knife. It is just a flash in the air, and then I hear a thud. The knife is buried in the board, half a foot away from the my cheek. I close my eyes. Thank God. "You about done Stiff?" asks Four. I remember Al's wide eyes and his quiet sobs at night and shake my head. "No." "Eyes open, then." He taps the spot between his eyebrows ...
"Come on, Stiff," he says. "Let someone else stand there and take it." Why is he trying to goad me into giving up? Does he want me to fail? "Shut up, Four!"
...
My body goes rigid. This time, when it hits the board, my ear stings, and blood tickles my skin. I touch my ear. He nicked it. And judging by the look he gives me, he did it on purpose. — Veronica Roth

But with her eyes closed, she began to whisper. "If you have someone to love, then love. If you have someone to forgive, then forgive. You think, when you're seventeen, there's time enough for that, but there's not. There's no time at all."
I squeezed her hand, trying to think of how to respond. But she took the burden from me and kept whispering. "You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that's the only way we can understand how he feels about us. Desperate and jealous. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Perhaps someone would say I had no choice but to trust her and perhaps this is true, but also, and I understand this now, I love her and I loved her in that rare way, that non-possessive and accepting way that it seems people are always trying and failing to love someone... — Catherine Lacey

Carl Sagan always used to say that when he was trying to explain something to someone, he would go back to that time when he didn't understand it, and then he would retrace his thought steps so that he could make it absolutely clear, and that's one of the infinite number of things I learned from him. — Ann Druyan

Jaidee studies the general's desk. "I wasn't aware that the Environment Ministry only inspected cargo at others' convenience."
"I am trying to reason with you. My hands are full with tigers: blister rust, weevil, the coal war, Trade Ministry infiltrators, yellow cards, greenhouse quotas, fa' gan outbreaks ... And yet you choose to add another."
Jaidee looks up. "Who is it?"
"What do you mean?"
"Who is so angry that you're pissing your pants this way? Coming to ask me not to fight? It's Trade, yes? Someone in the Trade Ministry has you by the balls."
Pracha doesn't say anything for a moment. "I don't know who it is. Better that you don't know, either. What you do not know, you cannot fight." He slides a card across the desk. "This arrived today, under my door." His eyes lock on Jaidee so that Jaidee cannot look away. "Right here in the office. Inside the compound, you understand? We are completely infiltrated."
Jaidee turns over the card. — Paolo Bacigalupi

We live someone else's life without trying to understand and become what we are really designed to be — Sunday Adelaja

We try to keep a good line of communication open with our children. It's not always about trying to just teach them every moment, but it's about listening to them and trying to understand them and gain that sense of communication so when they need to talk to someone, they know that we're there. — Victoria Osteen

But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget," Ray continued. "Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship
it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good
or we keep trying for the perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible. — Nicole Krauss

The whole world is nothing but a noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger's mouth. They call it civilization - that is a lie! But some day you may have to go out, someone will try to take you out, and you will not understand them or what they are saying, unless you understand nothing, absolutely nothing, then you will manage. — Djuna Barnes

That was ridiculous," I told Dorian, once she'd left. "She's not the kind of person to fall for your flirting." "On the contrary," said Dorian. "She's exactly the kind of person to fall for it. I understand these warrior maids, you know. They live such harsh, cold lives, always trying to keep up with the men ... when really, they just need someone to make them feel like a woman. And that, of course, is an area in which I excel. Why, if I'd had ten minutes alone with her - — Richelle Mead

Whatever someone told you, you can never be sure of what they said. Whatever someone said, you can never be sure of what you were meant to understand - so if it's really this complicated, what's the point of trying to infer things when you can just ask. — Rebecca Taylor

To understand the intensity of driving an F1 car, you have to be in it. When you're driving a 750hp machine at 200mph, the noise and the vibrations are incredible. The G-force when you take big corners is like someone trying to rip your head off. You hit the brakes, and it feels as if the skin is being pulled off your body. — Jenson Button

But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three- That's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which there qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll end up with nothing. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

It's important to understand that an atheist is someone who believes the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything. Some fundamental atheists will deny this by trying to redefine 'nothing' as being 'something,' because such a thought makes them look like a fool, which is precisely what the Bible says that they are — Ray Comfort

I saw the statue completely different now. I'd decided that he wasn't pointing to anything or anyone. Now all I could see was that he was reaching out his hand to someone. For me that explained the expression on his face that I'd never quite been able to understand before.

He was hopeful and nervous and scared and a little bit proud of himself for doing it - extending his hand to someone, not knowing if they'd take it. This was, I had realized, one of the scariest things of all, requiring much more courage than sailing across an ocean and landing on an unknown shore

At least that's what I saw. Clark and Tom's new theory was that he was a time traveler who'd somehow been transported to the past and was just trying to hail a cab. — Morgan Matson

Bloody North," said Shev as she picked her way towards it and had a tentative drag at the ropes. "Even their bridges are shit."
"Their men are good," said Javre, clattering out with no fear whatsoever. "Far from subtle, but enthusiastic."
"Great," said Shev as she edged after, exchanging a mutually suspicious glance with a crow perched atop one of the posts. "Men. The one thing that interests me not at all."
"You should try them."
"I did. Once. Bloody useless. Like trying to have a conversation with someone who doesn't even speak your language, let alone understand the topic."
"Some are certainly more horizontally fluent than others."
"No. Just no. The hairiness, and the lumpiness, and the great big fumbling fingers and ... balls. I mean, balls. What's that about? That is one singularly unattractive piece of anatomy. That is just ... that is bad design, is what that is. — Joe Abercrombie

I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else. — John Dufresne

Either you're lying again or you're as stupid as you look. You ditch me first year for him when you were a girl. You ditch me second year for him when you were a boy. You lie and cheat and steal for him while he treats you like crap, and I help you and care for you and worship you like a queen while you treat me like crap! What does that guy have that I don't? What makes him so lovable and me so unworthy? Know how many times I've asked myself that question, Sophie? How many times I've studied him like a book or sat in the dark picturing every last shred of him, trying to understand why he's more of a person than me? Or why the moment he's gone, you take a ring from the School Master - or Raphael or Michelangelo or Donatello or whatever you want to call him to make yourself feel better - just because he looks like you want him to look and says what you want to hear? When you could have had someone who's honest and kind and real? — Soman Chainani

Understanding the intricacies involved in raising someone with a physical or mental challenge for those who have never experienced it is like trying to understand anything foreign; impossible, though definitely worth doing anyway. — Lynette Louise

You may not understand this, but I don't think it matters killing people so long as you don't hate them. I also think that there are times when you can only show your feeling of brotherhood for someone else by killing him, or trying to. I believe most ordinary people feel this and would make a peace in that sense if they had any say in the matter. There has been very little popular resistance to this war, and also very little hatred. It is a job that has to be done. — George Orwell

I only believe in the easy things, like red lipstick
and coffee before noon and writing essays in pen.
I make my mind up about boys and then I unmake it,
compare us to continental drift, two ships passing.
I hit the snooze button too often. Write disposable
poems on napkins and old homework, try to discipline
myself when it comes to removing my makeup
before bed. I am trying to understand men better,
cut them some slack, write about them less. I dream
about oceans and mountains and wolves. I do not
always love myself. I do not always forgive myself.
I write apology letters and do not send them. Usually,
I do not mean it when I tell someone goodbye. — Kristina Haynes

Now I was also trying to understand how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace. If you had really loved something, wouldn't a little bit of it always linger? A couple of houseplants? A dinky Home Depot Phalaenopsis in a coffee can? I personally have always found giving up on something a thousand times harder than getting it started, but evidently Laroche's finishes were downright and absolute, and what's more, he also shut off any chance of amends. — Susan Orlean

SETH: But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. — Hanya Yanagihara

If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. — Douglas Adams

Now I understand. When you love someone, you have to try things even if they don't make sense to anyone else. — Gennifer Choldenko

There comes a time you discover things, step out into Life, Danny. You know? Step away and b-become yourself? You can't bring anyone else to those m-moments. Then after a while, you spend a big part of the r-r-rest of your life trying to find someone to discover what you've become. Where you've gone now. Someone to help you understand all you've b-become and vice-versa. — J.G. Hayes

The people who run our cities dont understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit ...
the people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff ...
any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you ,, its yours to take, rearrange and re use.Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.. — Banksy

don't you dare, for one minute,
believe that my kindness makes me
anything but insurmountable.
i did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt,
and stagger back, wounded and alive,
just to hear you call me weak for trying.
i opened my door to heartache -
i gave her the fucking key.
my softness for wayward strangers
has made me nothing less
than a halfway house for aching soles.
so when you open your mouth
and call me 'baby'
understand that i am not your next victim
in a laundry list of broken girls.
you think i don't know you? people like you?
people with mouths for hands.
i've got skin like topsoil
and your teeth could never take root.
so when you go looking to make a plaything
of a sunburst,
you better look for someone with less fire
than me.
because softness or no,
i will eat you alive
before i let you make a meal of me. — Ashe Vernon

I barely even know how I didn't feel. I didn't feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I did't even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn't feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn't feel like talking to someone who would understand. — Rivka Galchen

Churches should be places where people come to hear the story of God and to tell their own. That's how we find out how the two relate. Tell your story with all of its shadows and fog, so people can understand their own. They want a leader who's authentic, someone trying to figure out how to follow the Lord Jesus in the joy and wreckage of life. They need you, not Moses, — Angie Smith

In the process of trying to understand others' difficult behaviour, I've found it is very helpful to realise that no one chooses to be unhappy. If someone is unhappy, they will be so because they genuinely cannot see how to do otherwise. — Torey L. Hayden

Ivy linked her arm through mine again and I led her toward where I left the car. As we walked, some shrieking, and yelling broke over the sounds of the party, and I glanced around for what was going on. Over on the other side of the fire, two girls were on the verge of what looked like a fight. I couldn't help but stare because I was so surprised. One of the girls reached out and yanked a handful of the other's hair. It was all downhill from there.
Beside me, Ivy laughed. "That's what she gets for trying to steal someone's man."
I tore my eyes off the fight and glanced at Ivy. "Seriously?"
"Them bitches be cray-cray," she slurred.
I didn't understand what that meant, but I laughed because it sounded ridiculous.
- Ivy & Rimmel — Cambria Hebert

When I went back to look for it again I could never find it. It was as if someone had put some kind of glamour, some kind of spell, on that ground, and I felt as if I was walking in circles around it again and again, never able to see what was in front of my eyes.
That was how I felt about what happened to me when I turned thirteen. I felt as if I was always circling around my own brain trying to understand. — Francesca Lia Block

Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you. Like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you didn't know. The light just never went on, you know. I must have known, of course, but I was too scared to see the truth. Then fear just makes you so stupid. — Frances Mayes

Listening to learn isn't about giving advice
at least not until asked
but about trying to understand exactly what someone means,how it is that someone looks at and feels about her particular situation ... Listening to learn from a daughter in adolescence, conspiring with her thoughts and feelings, keeps a mother in touch with a daughter's growing and changing self. — Elizabeth Debold

Hire great writers If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. — Jason Fried

For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers? It's no more serious and more important than the numbers that fat red gentleman is adding up? Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, without even realizing what he'd doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself 'My flower's up there somewhere ... ' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important? — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

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

Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead. — George Packer