Anita Shreve Quotes

How can one know anything at all about people?

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

I feel like I can get a good feel for people.

Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.

Can I ever know you / Or you know me?

To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.

You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

When you know a person particularly well, you cannot escape their ruffled feelings.

I realize then that it's not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

Discover how little you know about the people you know.

Don't sum up a person based on what you see, or what you don't understand; get to know them

He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.

...but you have to know when you close those doors, you don't leave anything for the other person.

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

We know others to the extent that we know ourselves.

...you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

You have to be intimate with a person to know that person.

Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.

I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you don't understand me.

Am I getting smart with you? How would you know?

In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.