"Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding"
About this Quote
Quarrels rarely begin as explosions; they begin as bad translations. Gide’s line is quietly surgical: the argument isn’t the main event, it’s the sound system feeding back. “Amplify” is the tell. It suggests something small made loud, not through new facts but through volume, repetition, and the performative need to be heard. A misunderstanding is already an error in reception; a quarrel turns that error into a relationship-warping narrative.
Gide, a novelist of interior weather and moral ambiguity, knew that conflict often functions as displaced communication. People fight less about what happened than about what it means: a tone taken as contempt, a delay read as indifference, a critique heard as rejection. Once the quarrel starts, each side begins producing evidence to justify the feeling the misunderstanding triggered. The original misread becomes a scaffold for a bigger story: you always, you never, this is who you are. That escalation is the “amplification” Gide is diagnosing.
The subtext is almost bleakly modern: quarrels don’t correct misunderstandings, they canonize them. Conversation becomes courtroom, and winning replaces clarifying. Gide wrote in a period when psychology and self-scrutiny were entering mainstream art; his work often probes how people rationalize desire and pride. This aphorism belongs to that tradition. It treats human argument as less a search for truth than a mechanism for protecting the ego from the discomfort of being wrong, or worse, being unseen.
Gide, a novelist of interior weather and moral ambiguity, knew that conflict often functions as displaced communication. People fight less about what happened than about what it means: a tone taken as contempt, a delay read as indifference, a critique heard as rejection. Once the quarrel starts, each side begins producing evidence to justify the feeling the misunderstanding triggered. The original misread becomes a scaffold for a bigger story: you always, you never, this is who you are. That escalation is the “amplification” Gide is diagnosing.
The subtext is almost bleakly modern: quarrels don’t correct misunderstandings, they canonize them. Conversation becomes courtroom, and winning replaces clarifying. Gide wrote in a period when psychology and self-scrutiny were entering mainstream art; his work often probes how people rationalize desire and pride. This aphorism belongs to that tradition. It treats human argument as less a search for truth than a mechanism for protecting the ego from the discomfort of being wrong, or worse, being unseen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Andre
Add to List
