Understand

Famous quotes containing the word understand:

    ... some of my people could have been left [in Africa] and are living there. And I can’t understand them and they don’t know me and I don’t know them because all we had was taken away from us. And I became kind of angry; I felt the anger of why this had to happen to us. We were so stripped and robbed of our background, we wind up with nothing.
    Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977)

    I looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift I have ever been given. For what person, except one’s own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?
    Gerald Early (20th century)

    There is the fear that we shan’t prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man—fear that men won’t understand us and we shall be cut of from them.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)