Margaret Deland Quotes

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean.

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

I don't like making comparisons. You might say one slight thing, find yourself misinterpreted, and suddenly you're in trouble.

A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It's a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer. Furthermore, the writer is not there to see the reaction of the person he writes to, so there's a great unknown to the process that requires a leap of faith. The writer has to choose the right words to express his sentences, and then, once he has sealed the envelope, he has to place those thoughts in the hands of someone else, trusting that the feelings will be delivered, and that the recipient will understand the writer's intent. How childish to think that could be easy.

Ser compreendido é prostituir-se.

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?

I think I get misinterpreted and misunderstood a lot.

To be understood is to prostitute oneself

... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate.

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

And the seriousness with which the other party takes my words always raises the doubt whether I have taken them seriously enough myself.

I asked you, baby, If you understood- You told me that you didn't, But you thought you would.

It was strange how you could never form any conclusion from what women said. It was not that they did not know what they were talking about, but you never drew the right conclusions.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.

You'd be surprised how much you don't understand what other people see your actions as; how other people view the things you say and the things that you do. And a lot of times just clarifying what your intentions are with people makes a huge difference.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

Silence is a statement that is open to gross misinterpretation.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

Everybody in this public arena makes statements and gets interpreted different ways.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.