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Understood Quotes

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“It seems that the ancient Medicine Men understood that listening to another's story somehow gives us the strength of example to carry on, as well as showing us aspects of ourselves we can't easily see. For listening to the stories of others - not to their precautions or personal commandments - is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.”

“I don't think I had any idea at the time how to work with someone as masterful as he is. And I don't think at the time I really understood what was happening. I think I was in a space where I was like: there are all these things. I was shooting all these takes with David, and I was just confused, as a person, and as an actor feeling a little too big for my britches and that this thing was happening and then also not having enough skill yet, and technique to know exactly where I was, and know about the character.”

“Madison understood that if you want to protect rights from government abuse, you would be wise not to give government the power in the first place that can be used to abuse rights. That is a lesson we have forgotten. As we have asked government to do more and more for us, we have forgotten that a government big enough to give us everything we want will be powerful enough to take everything we have.”

“I didn't know enough as a writer to understand why I needed to do this, but I understood in a very gut way that I could not entertain those thoughts of pleasing people and write this book - that it would be a very different book. Without really sort of investigating that instinct, which I'm glad for, I just made a conscious decision to put blinders on and not think about anything and put it all in. And I did. I put everything in. I had to look at the whole picture to see what I needed.”

“For decades, I thought that scientific truth, solid economic case studies, and common sense were enough to bring about change on the environmental front. After all, the data is so compelling! I thought that if people just understood the severity of today's environmental threats and knew about available solutions, those solutions would happen. Not so.”

“And at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar, so I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot. So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense. And they were unique, but it really came out of the motivation to - or I understood it was - I was going to have to make my mark that way.”

“In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust compares himself to Scheherazade: he says he has finally understood the nature of the book he has to write, just at the moment when his advancing years and declining health have made him doubt that he's going to live long enough to write it. So he has to write against death like Scheherazade.”

“If a prospective Presidential approach can't be explained clearly enough to be understood well, it probably hasn't been thought through well enough. If not well understood by the American people, it probably won't 'sail' anyway. Send it back for further thought.”

“Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.”

“The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself: Are my trousers long enough?' Is my veil in place?' Can my make-up be seen?' Are they going to whip me?' No longer asks herself: Where is my freedom of thought?' Where is my freedom of speech?' My life, is it livable?' What's going on in the political prisons?”

“Again Creb grunted. It was the usual noncommittal comment used by men when responding to a woman. It carried only enough meaning to indicate the woman had been understood, without acknowledging too much significance in what she said.”

“I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.”

“The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”