Quotes About Perspective

We can't deny the ubiquity of faith. If we write in such a way as to prejudge such belief as in some way deluded or false, then are we not guilty of elitism, of imposing our world-view on the masses?

After August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end. Padma—did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course not; but I did.

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

A live dog is better than a dead lion, but death is preferable to poverty.

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own." Yes:

Yaln?z benim (renkli ve gösteriÅŸli olmas?na raÄŸmen) pek uzun say?lamayacak hayat?m?n sonunda, çivileyip asacak tezlerim taze bitti. Hayat da çarm?ha çivilenmekten pek farkl? deÄŸil zaten.

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

Ya-ta-hey (pop. 580) > Tohatchi (pop.

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.

Another lesson to be learned: never underestimate your fellow man. One man's ceiling is another man's floor.

Do not make the mistake, it said, speaking perfect English, of equating size with power. Or you might find a cricket squashing you under its thumb.

Rani, too, was perpetuating memories. Harappa the martyr, the demigod, lived on in his daughter's thoughts; but no two sets of memories ever match, even when their subject is the same (...)

The camera sees broken windows.

But the camera sees what he does not say. A camera is a thing easily broken or purloined; its fragility makes it fastidious. A camera requires law, order, the thin blue line. Seeking to preserve itself, it remains behind the shielding wall, observing the shadow-lands from afar, and of course from above: that is, it chooses sides.

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal, "and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

Fifteen years old! Okay, okay. In our part of the world that's not so young.

The limitations we place upon the world are imposed by ourselves rather than the world.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

Ask me how I can afford it." Riya fell into the trap and asked. "Oh, I'm now a transbillionaire," came the reply. "I identify as rich and so consequently I am.

Is the truth too poor a thing for us? Is any man innocent of embellishing it at times, or even of abandoning it entirely?

One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they posses the authentic taste of truth...that they are, despite everything, acts of love.

Actually I think it's the left eye that sees the truth," he added. "It sees everything distorted and deformed. Which in fact everything is. The right eye is the one that sees the fiction of normality. So I have truth and lies, one eye for each. It's good.

As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art.[...]The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized.

Aurora's studio she stole three charcoal sketches of me as a young boy, sketches in which my ruined hand had been wondrously metamorphosed, becoming, variously, a flower, a paintbrush and a sword. Miss Jaya took these sketches to my Dilly's flat and said they were a gift from the 'young Sahib'. Then she told Aurora that she had seen the teacher pinching them, and, excuse me, Begum Sahib, but that woman's attitude to our boy is not a moral one.