Quotes About Perspective

There are no new stories in nature, only new observers.

But I am a Southerner, and it is our prerogative, being us, to remember things as well damn well please.

I would have liked to stick my toes in the sand, or ride a tall horse. Today, I will go buy fifty pounds of cat food, and like it.

Oh, I would have seen it all, eventually, but it needed to happen to a boy; the world loses much of its wonder about the time you pay your first water bill.

Because everyone is an expert when it's not their dog in the road.

They, especially, taught me that you can't go through life not liking people because they didn't have to work as hard or come as far as you did. And who knows, maybe if I had bothered to get to know them better, maybe they had. Maybe they just didn't wear it like some bullshit badge of honor.

Mahes does 90 days for stealing fish. It costs taxpayers $162 a day to feed, clothe and house him at Rikers Island His 90-day sentence will cost them $14,580, to punish him for refusing to pay the $51.31 check. In five years he has cost them more than $250,000. Your tax dollars at work. (...) All around us are inmates who just want to go home. Mahes is already there. He has no expectations, so there are no disappointments: he does not envy people who are free, because they are free to suffer.

I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.

When you verbally appreciate people who are criticizing you, you're letting go of the need to defend, explain, or justify your behavior. You

You get along better with people when the emphasis is on similarities between you. The difference between conflict with a friend and conflict with a difficult person is that with a friend the conflict is tempered by the common ground you share. Success in communication depends on finding common ground before attempting to redirect the interaction toward a new outcome. Obviously, reducing differences is essential to your success in dealing with people you can't stand.

One way to take charge with difficult people in a poisoned atmosphere is to purposely blend with their body posture, facial expressions, and degree of animation. Blending sends the signal that "I'm with you! I'm not the enemy! I'm interested in what you say and do!

For this reason, masterful communicators make it their goal to listen and understand first, before attempting to be heard and understood.

In fact, there can be no doubt that when people have the experience that they've been listened to and understood, they let go of their preoccupation with their own thoughts and feelings. The door to their mind swings open, and that makes it much easier for them to hear you.

There are attitudinal changes that you can make in yourself that will set you free from your reactions to problem people.

Use "I" language. "From my point of view" and "The way I see it" are softening phrases that take the fight out of your words. They tell your difficult people that what you're expressing is your truth, rather than claiming to be the truth. This

When I'm at a Chinese restaurant having a hard time with chopsticks, I always hope that there's a Chinese kid at an American restaurant somewhere who's struggling mightily with a fork.

Not compromising isn't the same thing as being unreasonable.

What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.

If you will read and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.

Reading exposes is to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.

As your mind is renewed by the Spirit of Truth, you will not see relationships as opportunities to take from others, but to give.

Culturally one of the most difficult things that happens is to get creative people to understand [that] the world is no longer just defined by television. The thing that happened, and has been happening for some time here, is that our work was much more diverse than even we knew it was. And I think as we began to change, the way we tackled problems and the way that we looked at problems was completely and utterly holistic in a way that I'd probably not ever really experienced before.

Being right and being happy are on opposite ends of this dance that is the life of human machines.

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.