How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

ACTIVE CURIOSITY. You want to have an explorer’s heart. The novelist Zadie Smith once wrote that when she was a girl, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she wrote. “That is, what it would be like to be P

“Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”

Sometimes things that are hard to live through are very satisfying to remember.

The man of character is not removed and strong; he’s right there next to you on the bench as you work through the kinds of hard times

Open your notebook. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Write about your emotional experiences. Don’t worry about punctuation or sloppiness. Go wherever your mind takes you. Write just for yourself. Throw it out at the end. In the beginning, people who take part in expressive-writing exercises sometimes use different voices and even different handwriti

A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.

She later explained to me that “behavior is how we speak the unspeakable. John couldn’t speak something unspeakable, so he did it by being rude to others and by having this sense of himself as better than everybody else.”

She intuited that there was some internal struggle inside John, that there were feelings he was hiding from, which he had built moats and fortresses to keep away.

“is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journe

Ickes finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.