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Trying To Understand Quotes

No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk and of wasting time trying to understand it.
- J R R Tolkien

The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.
- Jodi Picoult

And as I stood there in the hallway--alone--trying to understand what had just happened and why, I realized the truth: I wasn't worth an explanation--not even a reaction. Not in your eyes.
- Jay Asher

We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.
- Isaac Asimov

I'm not a propagandist, I'm not a polemicist; my primary interest is just looking at and trying to understand how animals work.
- David Attenborough

I gave up trying to understand people long ago. Now I let them try to understand me!
- Charles M Schulz

Now, Anne, don't look as if you were trying to understand. Seventeen can't understand.
- L M Montgomery

You don't get it, do you?" I said. "It's not a question of 'what then'. Some people get a kick out of reading railroad timetables and that's all they do all day. Some people make huge model boats out of matchsticks. So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?
- Haruki Murakami

So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?
- Haruki Murakami

They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.
- Ray Bradbury

I think that what most artists are trying to do is trying to understand. I think what distinguishes creative people and/or artists from another type of person is perhaps a willingness to go headlong into that uncertainty.
- Brandon Boyd

I get in trouble when I say things like, 'I'm attracted to violence.' I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.
- Caleb Carr

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.
- Caleb Carr

Feeling it, trying to understand the suns that shone on it, the rains that fell on it, and the snows that covered it. And to wonder where I was when each thing happened to it in its lonely place, where I was, what I was doing, who I was loving, how I was getting along, where I was. I'd hold it, read it, feel it... and look at my own face in whatever reflection might be left.
- Stephen King

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
- Terry Pratchett

Especially moments when things are very difficult and complicated for me and I am still trying to grasp what is happening and I am still trying to understand and to reach family back home.
- Edwidge Danticat

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God a being capable of understanding.
- Graham Greene

I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.
- Ralph Fiennes

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
- Shirley Jackson

In a month, the passes into Teutlandt and Skanida will be open and my companion and I will be on our way."
He paused and Philemon frowned, trying to understand what he was being told.
You want us to come with you?" he asked, at last. "You expect us to follow you?"
Halt shook his head. "I have no wish to ever see any of you again," he said flatly.
- John Flanagan

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream
- Gustave Flaubert

Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
- Carl Sagan

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.
- Frank Gehry

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.
- Alberto Giacometti

I'm a bit of a layman physics junkie. I don't really understand it, but I love trying to understand it.
- Laura San Giacomo

I'm concentrating on staying healthy, having peace, being happy, remembering what is important, taking in nature and animals, spending time reading, trying to understand the universe, where science and the spiritual meet.
- Joan Jett

Companies are starting to measure how effective their customer service is and trying to understand what they can do to improve the customer service process.
- Sanjay Kumar

When I moved to Stanford I began to pursue the line of research I have been following ever since, namely trying to understand the larger implications of fractional quantum hall discovery.
- Robert B Laughlin

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.
- Joshua Lederberg

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.
- Yann Martel

I spent my time trying to understand grand jury procedure - a topic about which I never before had the slightest interest.
- Donella Meadows

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.
- Roger Michell

That's why we have practice rounds. We make the adjustments as we go around, try and find out how to play the golf course the best we can. No big deal, it's nothing to me, it's the same for me as it is to everybody and we're all trying to understand it.
- Greg Norman

We were trying, as I irrelevantly analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington
- Joseph O Neill

The real business of life is trying to understand each other.
- Gilbert Parker

The earth-self observing the Cosmos and trying to understand the Cosmos by scientific principles from which its self is excluded is, beyond doubt, the strangest phenomenon in all of the Cosmos, far stranger than the Ring Nebula in Lyra.
It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos.
- Walker Percy

Trying to understand Daddy is like trying to nail jelly to a tree.
- Dia Reeves

Trying to understand women is a tall order period.
- Rick Schroder

People are always trying to understand.
There is only one way to do that.
It is to discover < + i + >why< + i + > you want to understand.
- Idries Shah

I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
- Dani Shapiro

Man is, without doubt, the defacer, the destroyer. But spending at least the last three years in trying to understand the enemy has almost seduced me to his side.
- Elizabeth Smart

Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe, individual acts of decency and courage make a difference, then they need to be recorded and remembered.
- Fritz Stern

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