Quotes About Perspective

Belief is the enemy of a storyteller

Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany.

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.

You wanted people's stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care.

From my village I see as much of the universe as you can see from earth, So my village is as big as any other land For I am the size of what I see, Not the size of my height. —Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

The platter could probably sate four starving Ethiopians into a crapulous state.

Death is the only vantage point from which a life can be truly measured.

It's just that our memories are rarely where we think they are.

I am Raskolnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita. I am you. If you read these pages and think I'm the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can't feel my pain. If you believe you're not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you're unable to empathize. Like the bullet, I too stray. Forgive me.

He said you used him as a narrator, an interpreter of stories. I liked that term. I wondered if that was how you interacted with those around you. You wanted people's stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.

What breaks us is rarely what we expect.

Why is it that you live in such a safe place yet consider the world so dangerous?" "I'm an American.

most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we've made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

In order to live, I have to blind myself to my infinitesimal dimensions in this infinite universe.

Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us. My father and I may have shared numerous experiences, but, as I was constantly finding out, we rarely shared their stories; we din't know how to listen to one another.

When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

In the early pages of his gorgeous novel Sepharad, Antonio Munoz Molina writes: "Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it's the people who stayed who can't remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they're the one who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.

Dark clouds become heaven's flowers when kissed by light.

YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,' said the dewdrop to the lake.

Let him only see the thorns who has eyes to see the rose.