Quotes About Perspective

I was just... thinking. That must have been quite an experience for you.

I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and hating getting ripped off.

So: I knew dream life. In fact, in a way, I was actually comfortable with it. Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world---just no more confusing than any other.

He said he wanted to present an alternative; that it might be easier for whites to accept Martin's proposals after hearing him (Malcolm X).

Story is the greatest human mystery. Alex Miller, author, at BRWF 2014

No, Manuel said firmly. Gay isn't wrong or right. It just is.

If you think the sea is blue and I think it's green, why try to convince you?

Everyone can be sick in their soul and still think they're the good guys.

the Spaniards think, and the French think up.

If you're fucked up in the head there's no explanation. You might think about it one way one minute then two hours later you'll think about it totally different. It's too confusing to even try and put your head around it. Now, can we leave it alone?

Any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill.

when writing a biography, you can't trust certainties. Just as you're about to pounce on something that will condemn you to a tidy answer, pooooofff! It vanishes.

We find what we are looking for in life, her father had once said to her, which was true—if you look for happiness, you will see it; if you look for distrust and envy and hatred—all those things—you will find those too.

There was far too much interest in the past, she thought. People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present?

The danger, of course, is that we spend time imagining that we would be happier elsewhere, and forget to cultivate happiness where fate has placed us.

a drive in the country, an expedition to a shoe shop a quiet cup of tea under a cloudless sky; each of us had something that made it easier to continue in a world that sometimes, just sometimes, was not as we might wish it to be.

Look at those clouds, said Jamie, gazing up at the sky. Look at them. Yes, said Isabel. They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them. Look at the shape of the clouds, she said. What do you see in those beautiful clouds, Jamie? I see you, he said.

Professor Dr Moritz-Maria Von Igelfeld often reflected on how fortunate he was to be exactly who he was, and nobody else. When one paused to think who one might have been had the accident of birth not happened precisely as it did, then, well, one could be quite frankly appalled.

When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened?

I told him that if a man is born in a dry place, then although he may dream of rain, he does not want too much, and that he will not mind the sun that beats down and down.

Perhaps if you don't know there's a gap, you don't worry about it. If you were a millipede, a tshongololo , crawling along the ground would you look at the birds and worry about not having wings? Probably not.

She shook her head. What was the point of anger? There were occasions when Mma Ramotswe, like all of us, could feel angry, but they were few - and they never lasted long. Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds. She had never forgotten that - along with the things he said about cattle, and Botswana, and the behaviour of the rains.

What does it matter, she thought, if businesses are left unattended, if people are not always as we want them to be; we need the time just to be human, to enjoy something like this: a boy chasing ants, a dry land drinking at last, birds in the the sky, a rainbow.

There was no word for self-pity in the language of the north-east of Scotland - the nearest being a word which is defined in the Scots dictionary as being 'a term used to express self-reproach on paying too much for something.