Quotes About Perspective

We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without.

But I had made contact with a different planet from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.

And who's to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?

It used to surprise me, the intensity with which I still remembered these distant memories. But when I entered my fifties...I understood their enduring clarity....In the end, what adds up to a life is nothing more than the accumulation of small daily moments.

What is the purpose of memory? Is it a trick to make sure we don't forget who we are by reminding us of who we were?

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

What will people say, you running off to Memphis like you don't have a house to look after? Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me. Well, say Grady, trying to bring light. A woman can't git a man if peoples talk. Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and laugh.

If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.

Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's 'hard times' were made harder by them.

All womens not alike, Tobias, she say. Believe it or not. Oh, I believe it, he say. Just can't prove it to the world.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins

I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.

He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don't like me cause I'm a man? I blow my nose. take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern, frogs is what they stay.

Susannah was glad that, on principle, she rarely listened to men. Rarely believed, really, a word they said. No matter how much she might love them.

Tashi knows she is learning a way of life she will never live.

Si viene, yo feliz. Si no, contenta. Y entonces caigo en que puede que ésta sea la lección que yo tenía que aprender.

We recall that to the Cherokee, as to other people who have noticed how long it sometimes takes for humans to develop fully, adulthood comes--if it is coming at all--at the age of fifty-two.

From paradise to paradise I go sweeping; collecting rocks & views; owning nothing but what I feel.

I never dreamed I would so enjoy having a father. It is like having another interesting mind, somewhat similar to your own but also strangely different, to rummage through.

I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after.

The reason I absolutely treasure literature is that it has taken me out of myself. Out of the narrow self, in which I could easily be stuck, and it has opened up the world to me. It has opened up the emotions of other people and their own aspirations and cares-Alice Walker