Quotes About Perspective

Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else? When you eat a wing or an egg or a drumstick, at what point is it no longer a chicken? When you read these words on a page, what happens to them, when they become you?

In Japan if you say "the war," people know you mean World War II, because that was the last one that Japan fought in. In America it's different. America is constantly fighting wars all over the place, so you have to be more specific.

Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.

This is trouble with you. You think you want, you don't think you want–always back and forth. Me, when I want, it is with whole heart. I look at wanted thing with eyes straight on. But you! Neither here nor there. Your looking always crooked, from side of eye. It has no power to hold. So wanted thing, it slip away from you.

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

On the far side stretched the open Pacific and beyond, but the crow could not fly high enough to see its way home.

When everything you think you own—your belongings, your life—can be swept away in an instant, you must ask yourself, What is real?

books are patient. We know how urgent and compelling your lives are, and so we bide our time.

schools while their dads are on company assignments, and then have to catch up with their Japanese grade level when their dads get transferred back. Only my dad wasn't on a company assignment, and he wasn't getting transferred

if the washroom was unreal, then none of what he remembered from that afternoon in the washroom could be real, either.

Do you have to live to be a hundred to really grow up?

We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too.

Montaigne wrote that death itself is nothing. It is only the fear of death that makes death seem important.

When I'd put enough distance between us, it occurred to me that I was probably the only person in the history of the world who has ever recalled Sh?nagon in a strip joint in Texas. I liked that

We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century, Oliver said. Who isn't?

For the time being, standing on the tallest mountaintop, For the time being, moving on the deepest ocean floor, For the time being, a demon with three heads and eight arms, For the time being, the golden sixteen-foot body of a buddha, For the time being, a monk's staff or a master's fly- swatter, For the time being, a pillar or a lantern, For the time being, any Dick or Jane, For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.

He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing, Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.

Assumptions suck. They're like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship

I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and hugged it when it has no more to offer.

Yes, it's good to remember. A lot of people have asked your question, Benny. It's probably the oldest question in the book, but that doesn't mean it's not special to you. Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things

At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave. It wasn't my fault that I didn't understand what was happening.

Even as the Blue Marble was miniaturizing your conception of Earth, it was inflating your sense of importance in relation to it, endowing you a godlike perspective and agency.

And so, yes. The Tidy Magic that Cory read was different from the Tidy Magic that Annabelle read, and different, too, from the book that Aikon thought she wrote and her critics on Twitter condemned—and yet all these books were accurate, complete and perfect, just as they are.

For most humans throughout history, "more" wasn't even an option. "Enough" was the goal and was, by definition, enough.