Quotes About Perspective

I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don't feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to her twins, and really, from the back, it looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen? I think, but, oh well, I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

The past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young

There's nothing I want to relive—certainly not youth—and as for what's to come, I'm in no hurry. I

But I have to resist the impulse to create memories suitable for framing.

What if some man wanted to tell me how many feet from a dwelling a cesspool needed to be? What if he wanted to talk about the pros and cons of raising the mortgage rate? What if he wanted to talk about his childhood? Or worse, mine!

I appreciate how hard it is to throw such things away, and harder still to pack them up and move them with you, but other people's condiments are depressing.

What I used to fear was growing old—not the aches and pains part or the what-have-I-done-with-my-life part or the threat of illness, none of that. I just couldn't imagine what my life would be like without the option of looking good.

It seems to me, he emailed me later, that you start out with what you know or what you think you know and you work within those 'truthful' boundaries until you reach some sort of wilderness of not knowing, and then you find a way through until you see an end, or you find a way through until you find the end that you've already seen. It can work either way: running away from the truth, or running out of it.

He said maybe irony is the lens through which we see the picture in reverse

My definition of fear is that it's a constant companion, a sidekick, riding you like a watch, going in and out of the days. I don't live like that anymore. The fact that I'm sixty-three has something to do with it. What I used to fear was growing old—not the aches and pains part or the what-have-I-done-with-my-life part or the threat of illness, none of that. I just couldn't imagine what my life would be like without the option of looking good.

Part of what I've learned is that if it isn't life and death, it isn't life and death.

Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.

Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong? Wasn't my memory of a memory also real?

What is art, anyway, except not pounding on walls.

What seems to be a stone is a drama.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature. One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted, regarding events as a natural course of things.

The human mind is one-sided. It can never grasp all of reality at once. When we look at things we see either the features which they have in common or the features that distinguish each of them.

Tact: the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.

Don't criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, And this too, shall pass away. How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

Life is hard but so very beautiful

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

To believe in the things you can see and touch is no belief at all - but to believe in the unseen is a triumph and a blessing.