Quotes About Perspective

We're of one mind, Grenville and I, and the mind is hers, on account of my being a man and not having one.

Not everything's funny, Mother. No, said Leola, so I guess when you can laugh,, it's all the sweeter.

The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.

When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.

CHARLIE Have you ever wondered—I am being devil's advocate now—if just possibly he hadn't "capitalized," so to speak, on the backwardness he found here? MARTA (Tightly) Mr. Morris, I am not a very complicated person. I believe that people are what they do. You may think it simple-minded of me if you like—but if you don't understand the depth of his sacrifice merely by being here—

TSHEMBE Perhaps my obsessions have made me myopic! In this light, for instance, I really cannot tell you from Major Rice! (Peering close into the other's face, he grins) You all really do look alike, you know Ã¢â'¬Â¦

I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, That's funny, or instead of smiling said, That's interesting, or instead of saying, You are a stupid blithering idiot, said, Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.

Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.

Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.

She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.

I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!

My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, Hi, do you have any kids? and then, Why not, don't you like kids? I like kids, I will explain. I like kids very much. And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.

Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.

My mother's capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.

I watched my friend Eleanor give birth, she said. Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months.

You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.

A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.

The proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard. What the cook takes from the cupboard is not the same thing as what is in the cupboard.

The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.

You have everything, she said to Number One. You have too much: money, power, women. It was absurd to talk about these things in a place like Cleveland. But then the world was always small, no matter what world it was, and you just had to go ahead and say things about it.

I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.