Quotes About Perspective

El éxito te aleja de las cosas que conoces, por lo visto, mientras que el fracaso te condena a ellas.

Supongo, añadí, que esa es una definición del amor, creer en algo que solo dos personas pueden ver.

What is the point of self pity if there is was nobody to pity you for it?

what is the point of self pity if there was nobody to pity you for it?

In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

What is history other than memory without pain?' he said, smiling pleasantly and folding his small white hands together on the table in front of him. 'If people want to recapture some of those hardships, these days they go to the gym.

So much power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living.

Obviously, I said, she could do what she liked, and I would help her as much as I could. But I'd be wasting my time, she said. Not wasting it, I said. But spending it.

Parece que o sucesso leva você para longe daquilo que conhece, disse ele, enquanto o fracasso o condena a isso.

Hearing the dreadful things he had said about me, it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself.

So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

you survived your own death and there was nothing left to do but to talk about it, to strangers on a plane or whoever would listen

the idea of L ever coming to where I was and looking at it through his own eyes, which would have taken that consummation to a point of finality and given me – or so I believed – a version of the freedom I had wanted my whole life.

Perhaps it follows, he said, that people who live in the sun don't take responsibility for their own happiness.

it is the very thing you don't see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

his whole life, as far as she could see, consisted of writerly sinecures and engagements, like a whole life of eating only desserts. She wasn't sure it was healthy.

I hadn't realised, I said, how much of navigation is the belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind.

And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

In marriage you go away from other people, but at the end of marriage they come out to welcome you back. This is civilisation, she says. The worst thing that happened to you has brought out the best in them.

For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives.

My father, a man, advanced male values to us, his daughters. And my mother, a woman, did the same.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.