Understood Quotes
I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it.
Lewis Carroll
Years ago I read an interview with Paula Fox in which she said that in writing, truth is just as important as story. Reading that interview was the first time I really understood that there's no point in trying to impress people with my cleverness when I can just try to write honestly about what matters most to me.
Molly Antopol
I have never really understood the objection to art which is specifically made for a gallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or taken home. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to the chamber work or novels to the short story.
Nicholas Serota
I always thought I had crooked eyebrows and crooked teeth. That's why I never understood why people called me a beauty.
Lauren Bacall
Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn't understood.
Weihui Zhou
I never really understood what was expected of me as a man, or how I was supposed to interact with women, but worse, with other guys. I did not relate to them.
Michael Ian Black
I think that anybody who thinks science is going to explain everything in biological systems, or in physical cosmology, et cetera, is actually mistaken, because I think within science - if correctly understood - those claims are not being made.
George Coyne
Keep always in mind the rule of faith which I profess and by which I bear witness that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are inseparable from each other, and then you will understand what is meant by it. Observe now that I say the Father is other distinct, the Son is other, and the Spirit is other. This statement is wrongly understood by every uneducated or perversely disposed individual, as if it meant diversity and implied by that diversity a separation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Tertullian
I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.
George Plimpton
Mrs. Lammle's manner changed under the poor silly girl's embraces, and she turned extremely pale: directing one appealing look, first to Mrs. Boffin, and then to Mr. Boffin. Both understood her instantly, with a more delicate subtlety than much better educated people, whose perception came less directly from the heart, could have brought to bear upon the case.
Charles Dickens
It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.
Margaret Mitchell
One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Just listen to these people. You'd swear they understood each other though not one of them has any idea what their words actually mean to another.
Andre Alexis
It was like she understood something about me that she'd never quite understood before. I always felt that when she looked at me, she was trying to find me, trying to find out who I was. But it seemed at that moment that she saw me, that she knew me. But that confused me.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks.
Rick Perlstein
The best doctrine may become the worst, if imperfectly understood, erroneously interpreted, or superstitiously followed.
Anna Leonowens
Maybe, in the final analysis, they saw me as something I wasn't and I tried to turn them into something they could never be. I loved them all but maybe I never understood any of them. I don't think they understood me.
Ava Gardner
