Quotes About Perspective

because it was so much more comforting to believe that language alone could remake the world.

You could forgive Brenner a lot, once you saw what 'e'd witnessed, what 'e'd been through . . . but that's true of everyone really, innit? Once you know, ev'rything's explained. It's a shame you often don't know until it's too late . . .

Britain. Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts of the case, you would have been unfit to sit on a jury.

Would I call myself English?' he mused aloud. 'No, I'd probably say British.

Alcohol buoyed you up and it washed your eyes clean.

For in every ill-turn of fortune the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is the one who has been happy. Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae

Always remember that there are more important things than being rich.

She remembers how she 'wanted only to see the good' and the rest she 'simply shoved aside'.

Photographs don't discriminate between the living and the dead. In the fragments of time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Now you see us; now you don't. It doesn't matter whether you look through a camera lens and press the shutter. It doesn't even matter whether you open your eyes or close them. The pictures are always there. And so are the people in them.

In a world that thought itself so wise yet behaved so stupidly, it was possible sometimes to believe that only the mad saw matters as they truly were, that only people like my brother were prepared to admit what they saw from the corner of their eye.

The trouble with altering the facts to fit the picture is that it's a cumulative exercise. It starts as a game — a bit of a lark really. Then it gets serious, then complicated, then . . . then pleasure becomes pain because you find yourself and everyone else believing the charade — living the lie as if it were the truth.

If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.

Nothing says hell has to be fire.

I heard this old country guy say once, "I think you decide pretty early on how happy you're going to be, and then you just go on and be it." But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.

Children remember staying up late. Grownups think about getting up early

When you're young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand- new penny, but before you get to wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good, long look, because that may be as far as you're ever going to go.

It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy, Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough. Catherine

You choose to let things bother you. You can just as easily choose not to notice the irritating offender, to consider the matter trivial and unworthy of your interest. That is the powerful move. What you do not react to cannot drag you down in a futile engagement. Your pride is not involved. The best lesson you can teach an irritating gnat is to consign it to oblivion by ignoring it.

In old magazines and newspapers we find a number of uncomfortably revealing things: the aged as young, the dead as living, forgotten people as celebrities, an array of our own barbarous and long-discarded fads and postures, and worst, visible only in this removed perspective, our own sickening pretensions to meaning and permanence.

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong pace, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

Any fool can count the seeds in an apple. Only God can count all the apples in one seed.

historian C. V Wedgwood, "History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only."43

Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

You never suffer from a money problem, you always suffer from an idea problem.