″...I saw that what he had previously said, and which had appeared to me void of meaning, was so thoroughly logical that I could not understand how it was I had not understood him sooner.”
“How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.”
“It’s easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It’s hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”
“People are naïve about such things...and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.”
Linnea has visited Claude Monet’s garden! In Paris, she got to see many of his actual paintings. Now she understands what it means for a painter to be called an Impressionist.
Out of the frozen wastes she studied the words and runes that would give her power to understand the messages of the ghost drum. At last she heard Safa’s cries.
“It was deeply a part of Lee’s kindness and understanding that man’s right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary”