Quotes About Perspective

Things you make up bleed into things tha' definitely happened. Like describin' an event, an actual occasion. You add to it, you take things out. You forget exact details. I don't think it's dishonest.

We don't take it too seriously, said Harry. —What? —The golf. —To avoid the disappointment, said Liam.—The same with everything. That's what it's all about now, isn't it? From here on in. Avoiding disappointment.

I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for awhile, and that's the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, is how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking.

That does it. It can't be true love. Mr. Willow has eyes like a sick kitten. You might love a sick kitten but you don't marry it, you keep it as a pet.

In his opinion, humans were best when miserable, and so he had worked at being miserable his whole life, and in his generous way tried to make as many people miserable as possible.

Will it hurt? I ask. Getting your parts replaced? Freak doesn't answer for a while and then he says in his stern, smart voice, Sure it will hurt. But so what? Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of anything, even pain. I'm pretty worried about the whole deal, and I go, But why do you want to be the first? Can't someone else be first? Isn't it dangerous? Life is dangerous, Freak says.

I don't suppose anybody really knows how bad a thing can be until it actually happens.

Until I saw what happened to Mongo, I thought that getting canceled was the worst thing that could happen. Wrong. Being dead and not knowing it is much, much worse.

I found there was only one way to look thin: hang out with fat people.

Life's a short trip. You'll find out.

I'm not a hypochondriac, but my gynaecologist firmly believes I am.

The object we love seems to us more beautiful than it is:

Is it our senses that lend the subject these different conditions, while the subjects nevertheless have only one? That is what we see in the bread we eat; it is only bread, but our use makes of it bones, blood, flesh, hair, and nails:

For the rest, who can be fit to judge of these differences? As we say of debates about religion, that we need a judge who is not attached to one or the other side, exempt from choice or affection, which is not possible among Christians, so it is likewise in this case.

Since no one individual can mandate a perfectly accurate description of reality, you must draw from many other people's perceptions to imbue your reality with the deepest possible understanding of its many hues and shades.

They view painful situations as accidents, bad luck, or something that was done to them. But many of the problems we face in life are not accidents. Most of the time our problems are ones we bring on ourselves

They view painful situations as accidents, bad luck, or something that was done to them. But many of the problems we face in life are not accidents. Most of the time our problems are ones we bring on ourselves. This is why learning to Own It is so important.

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

Gene Siskel used to describe old-age makeup as making young actors look like turtles.

When you're young you don't realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older;

All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid.

How quickly we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall, about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove people mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.

A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.

As we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do, after all, amount to more than a hill of beans.