Quotes About Perspective

It's said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one's capacity for great joy.

All the time, I looked out our lattice window. I watched the birds fly by. I followed the clouds on their travels. I studied the moon as it grew larger, then shrank. So much happened outside my window that I almost forgot what was happening inside that room.

To learn a different language is to learn a different way of living

Other kids get white rice, but the food you give us makes it look like we're living a subsistence life." "I buy white rice for the New Year's Festival," I said, stung. Then, defensively, "I often put barley in your lunch –" "Which is even more embarrassing, because that means we're really poor." "What a lucky child you are to say that. You don't know what poor means –

I used to think mothers-in-law are difficult the world over, but on that day I came to understand that they're simply unknowable.

What the body knows and what the mind chooses to believe are two different things, after all.

A woman isn't just one thing. The past is in us, constantly changing us. Heartache and failure shift perspectives as do joy and triumphs.

Every one of us could complain, but would that make our situation emotionally easier or physically more comfortable?

When you're held underwater, you think only of air. I remember how I felt about Shanghai in the days after our lives changed - how streets that had once seemed exciting suddenly stank of nightsoil, how beautiful women suddenly were nothing more than girls with three holes, how all the money and prosperity suddenly rendered everything forlon, dissolute and futile. The way I see Los Angeles and Chinatown during these difficult and frightening days couldn't be more different.

Sometimes you think you have all of tomorrow ahead of you,' Mama often said. 'When the sun is shinning, think of the time it won't be, because even when you're sitting in your house with the doors shut, misfortune can fall from above.

Joy is a delicious luxury that we experience most cautiously, for tragedy conceals itself around every corner.

Si a los tres años eres feliz, serás feliz a los ochenta.»

DR. ROSEN: Does the phrase grateful-but-angry have resonance for anyone? You can be grateful you have your mom and dad, because they love you and they've given you good lives with all kinds of privilege.

From the second I woke up, I had seen my family in new ways and they had me filled with strange emotions --melancholy, sadness, jealousy, and a sense of injustice about many things that suddenly seemed unfair.

It took me me many years to realize that my perceptions at this time was completely wrong.

It's said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one's capacity for great joy.

What could I do, to make the most of this day, whether I was in my own day, or this one? What amazing history was I seeing firsthand? Would I embrace it, instead of crying and whining? Was it in me to be grateful for my situation? Truly in me?

You are one of the wealthiest women of the city, Gabriella.' I smiled. Because like, two months ago, I was begging Mom to borrow thirty bucks for a sweater. Rich. I could get into that.

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are.

I didn't see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone's life.

But that's the thing about mental illness; there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.

But in the end, it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them. That's where you have control over your life.

Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up.

Nobody told you that wen you became a parent, you became a child again; it was early bedtimes and grilled cheese sandwiches for all. Every date night was a negotiation, every invitation that you actually had the desire or energy to accept became a strategic maneuver that may or may not work out after all.