Quotes About Perspective

_Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds.

The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small—to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways—to get it.

History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners.

It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.

we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.

one-eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads. A

But memory remains, experience is a great teacher, and, after all, one has lived to play both parts. ~ E.D. Morel

To those who had lived in Africa for millennia, of course, "there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time," as a future African statesman would put it. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for "discovering" some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.

What made it so easy for Haig to demand high casualties was that he chose not to see them. He "felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations," wrote his son, "because these visits made him physically ill.

Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

That the author is speaking only to us, that he is writing only for us, that no one on Earth has the same relationship to that author as we do. I have the same fantasy every time I read a book I love, no matter who wrote it, no matter when it was written. That the author has written his book only for me.

recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love;

I'm half white, I said, folding my arms. Hrrm. Which half? I blinked. Uh...dunno. Let's just say it's from the waist down. Chief Shouting Bear nodded. Deal. I only hate your legs.

So why the pelican? Said Haskoll. The thief was giving Haskoll a look that said, Man, why NOT the pelican?

You are singing to the preacher, said J.Lo. Preaching to the choir, I corrected him. Yes. This thing.

I am rubber but you are blue. Whatevers you are saying bounces off of me and I do not remember the rest.

When you have only ever experienced privilege, equality feels like oppression.

When all you've ever known is privilege, equality feels like oppression.

We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.

Alas, we are no more or less evolved than any creature. Uniqueness is terribly overrated.

We all reinvent our pasts, but writers are in a class of their own

I cannot get used to the dispassion with which wealthy Greeks contemplate their impoverished compatriots;

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another...

Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another.  I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love.  I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.