Quotes About Perspective

Seldom can one hate a person if one understand that person.

opinions may have truth in them but that truth must be free of opinions.

Be content with you own life, my friend, and live it well. Let others decide for themselves what path they will follow.' She frowned up at him. 'Even when you see, with absolute clarity, that is wrong for them? That they hurt themselves?' 'Perhaps people have a right to their pain,' he hazarded. Reluctantly he added, 'Perhaps they even need it.

How much do you understand?' I demanded of her one afternoon. She cocked her head at me, met my gaze and demanded, 'How much do YOU understand?

It was all so meaningless when I looked at it that way. It was meaningless in the same way as when I stood up from a game and then looked down on the scatter of playing pieces, and realized that they all were just bits of polished stone on a wooden board marked with squares. All the meaning they'd had moments before when I'd been trying to win a game were meanings that I'd imbued them with. Of themselves, neither they nor the board had any significance.

No man can return to being a boy. But there are interludes in a man's life when, for a time, he can recapture the feeling that the world is a forgiving place and that he is immortal.

for so long I'd been told what the rules were that I couldn't see they were just rules made by men. And if men can make rules, then other men can change them.

Dying is boring, Nighteyes observed.

That no man can truly imagine being happy and that's why happiness isn't for sale here.

Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day.

Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it's like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character's skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating.

You are different, Bee. It will make some parts of your life very difficult. But if you always fall back on your differences to explain everything you dislike about the world, you will fall into self-pity.

They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree.

There can be much more to a decision than you can know at this stage of your life.

Stop defining yourself by what you can't do. Why don't you consider what you didn't lose?

Sometimes it is easier to pull a knife out of a man than to ask him to forget words you have uttered.

Uma pedrinha pode fazer sair uma roda do seu caminho, disse-me ele, mas avisou-me que a experiência raramente era agradável para a pedrinha.

He wished his own respect for her was enough to make her see her own worth, and he recognized the selfishness of that wish. He could not be her entire world

I was confused, thinking that my pain and my loss were one and the same thing, whereas one was but a symptom of the other.

Bee. Nothing happens to you. You happen to everything.

Sometimes, when one goes back to the scene of one's childhood, things seem smaller. What was mysterious and the sole province of adults suddenly seems commonplace and mundane when viewed with mature eyes.

It was a simple account of an incident from his childhood. At the time I recall that I wondered why he had written it down. He obviously remembered it clearly; why bother to record it on paper? Only later was I to learn from my own obsessive journaling of my dreams that sometimes the best way to understand something is to write it down." p. 355

Why do you chop your life into bits and give the bits names? Hours, days. It is like a rabbit. If I kill a rabit, I eat a rabbit. When you have a rabbit, you chop it up and call it bones and meat and fur and guts. And so you never have enough.

I sometimes think that age is based more on what you've done and what you remember than how old you are.