Quotes About Perspective

Sometimes people close a door because they're trying to figure out a way to get you to knock.

I've seen the photos," he said. "Photos are never the same as the real thing," I said.

And this is the only really startling thing about the evil of the world: not that so much of it exists, but that nobody ever really expects it.

There's no reality but versions of reality.

What's the problem? In a nutshell?" "I'm a medical specialist. We don't really do nutshells[.]

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? . . . Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. —Bram Stoker, Dracula

Churchill also kept pigs and had a wire brush attached to a long stick in order to scratch their backs. 'Dogs look up to you,' he told an aide in 1952, 'cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.

To understand a man,' Napoleon once said, 'look at the world when he was twenty.

Napoleón dijo en una ocasión que «para entender a un hombre hay que observar cómo era el mundo a sus veinte años».

we could all die without regretting life.'35

One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".

everyone who exists is mentally compromised. We all accumulate false information over time, internalize it, and are influenced by it, consciously or otherwise. We are, in part, a product of these biases, as well as all other information we gather in our lifetimes.

This was both unsettling, since I'd been duped, and a little comforting in that it took away some of my feeling of guilt for my actions. Ah, the sweet power of deflecting responsibility.

It wrote me "helpful" comments about each of the rooms I was going through, like, "This is the Room of Eternal Death. It's like the Room of Normal Death, but somewhat more repetitive." That sort of thing.

That was my father's philosophy, and we'd both been trained to believe it completely. I didn't start to have my doubts until after Tristan was gone. I was grateful that Sera had never been raised with those values.

I'd always thought "die" would have more symmetry in the last line, but when I'd brought it up to my parents, they'd accused me of being needlessly fatalistic.

He was notably taller than last time. Meaning, of course, that he was back to being human height. I admit to having been slightly disappointed. The tiny Vanniv was adorable.

Is...Teft complimenting us? Wait, no, I'm not part of the group that is going. Everything makes sense again.

I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.

Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.

Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material.

I look at you, and you're young. You'll always be that way for me. But not for anyone else. Arthur, people who meet you now will never be able to imagine you young.

Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.

Mr. Wellins said it didn't matter what a writer intended his work to mean, that the only thing that mattered was what it meant to the reader, and I guess I could see his point, but I still thought he was a creepy old pervert.