Quotes About Perspective

Because of my underpants?" Ivan asks. "Chiefly because of Pontius Pilate." [from Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita ]

The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.

We will not drink from the same cup - Neither water nor sweet wine is ours, We will not kiss as the sun goes up Or gaze at the night, on the sill, for hours. I breathe by the moon, you – by the sun

At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.

It's not about being happy,' he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I've ever heard.

She did horror stories on herself, filling in blanks where I refused to supply information. This meant she wrote the entire script herself.

No longer did I want to explain, for I could see myself in the moment, exactly as she was seeing me, as all of them were seeing me.

That relative, that temporal plane -- where sensitivities vary, where no one has the same personal history even if they have the same communal history, where something which is a trigger for one person passes off unnoticed by another person -- definitely was the place where the raw living of life and the imperfect mental response to that raw living took place.

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

People who are sick, or who have been sick, or have come close to death have a lot to say - and they want you to hear it.

Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.

When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture: by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human. When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else's eyes.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.

I had very good eyes once. Though it's another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

Children are the only people who can see adults from inside their lives, permitted to observe every small thing, as if their forming minds are incapable of judging what they see, or as if it does not lodge there, somewhere, permanently,

The blue-eyed rabbi in our village at Samotschin used to talk to me as though I were a grown person, even when I was just a boy. We must believe in God, he told me, because if we don't we will have to believe in man, and then we will only be disappointed.

And I think about those Stasi men. They would never in their lives have imagined that they would cease to exist and that their offices would be a museum. A museum!

But I must say it has been, in general, a boon not to have been a beautiful woman. Because I was barely looked at, I was free to do the looking.

Il (...) lui a rétorqué que c'était sa vie. C'est vrai. C'est sa vie. Mais c'est nous qui sommes tristes. (L'échappée belle, p.51)

Et puis nos certitudes ne tiennent jamais debout. Un jour on voudrait mourir et le lendemain on réalise qu'il suffisait de descendre quelques marches pour trouver le commutateur et y voir un peu plus clair...

It's a hypothesis. History won't take us far enough to confirm it. And our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.

On ne peut jamais prévoir. Ni comment les choses vont se dérouler, ni pourquoi des trucs tout simples prennent soudain des proportions démentes.

Tev š? vai t? visas skaist?s lietas liekas negl?tas…

Our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.