““In fact, there’s probably only one thing worse than not being able to understand a person.”
“What’s that?” asked Nimrod.
“Being able to understand him completely.””

Singapore, (17 February 2017)[citation needed].

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

Source: Labyrinths of Reason (1988), Chapter 1: "Paradox", p. 21

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Context: It is one thing to know your author-man or woman or gay or black or paraplegic or president. It is another thing to choose only man or woman or et cetera, as the only quality of voice empowered to address you, as the only class of sensibility or experience able to understand you, or that you are able to understand.
How a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads. American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone: "Self-Help" or "Health." There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. The professor of Romance languages at Dresden, a convert to Protestantism, was tortured by the Nazis as a Jew — only that — a Jew. His book, published sixty years after the events it recounts, is shelved in my neighborhood bookstore as "Judaica." There is no shelf for irony.

Source: The Iron Jackal

Source: A Place Called Here

Variant: If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Briefwechsel, ed. Arthur Henkel (1955-1975), vol. VI, p. 22.