Quotes About Perspective

There was a weird intimacy, sitting in a car together. Couples sat in cars. Cops and their partners. Strangers became unstrange, sharing a windshield view of the world.

Booze has a different effect when you're, like, ten. Its doesn't round out the edges so much as wash you right out of the picture.

There were mornings I thought drugs made me insane and mornings I thought they kept me from going that way.

This is, I believe, what happens when people take their own lives. They're not killing themselves, they're killing the world. Either to spare it pain or to cause it some, depending.

It can make you sad to look at pictures from your youth. So there's a trick to it. The trick is not to look at the later pictures.

Ka?dy cz?owiek ma jak?? racj?, tylko nie ka?da racja wychodzi na zdrowie.

Para vivir hay que aprender a mirar la muerte con cierta indiferencia. No hay que dedicar a los muertos demasiados sentimientos ni pensar en ellos en exceso. No lo necesitan. No necesitan nada. No existen. Sólo los vivos existen.

Life is a state of mind.

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

Roth wrote The Breast . Would you ask him how he could do this since he had never been a breast? Adams wrote Watership Down . Would you ask him how he could do this since he admitted his rabbit knowledge came from a book about rabbits? ... And those hobbits!... I am a bigger risk-taker than these others. The Hoosiers can contradict me. No rabbit, hobbit, or breast has been known to speak up in reply to their exploiters.

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?

Never fall into the mistake of believing, said the examiner, that things are everywhere the way they are here, wherever here is, wherever everywhere is.

The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable.

In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing. Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition. Did they glow with light? They did, but of course, it could not be seen. And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows.

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn't what is or what was.

The world isn't the place we are told to live in. It is another place entirely. We have both more choice, and less, than we are supposed to have.

Why had he done it? It had been an idea of the morning—morning ideas were always flawed. They never take into account the accretion of weariness and grief that the late day brings.

I was wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. Everyday life is the province of death. It is where all dying takes place--for the extraordinary lands we imagine simply do not exist. There is only the ordinary. It is what we inhabit, and when death comes to find us it is there that he looks.