Quotes About Perspective

Father, what you said to me was absolutely true but totally useless.' 

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions. We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.

Primera verdad: estás aferrado a una falsa creencia, a saber, la de que sin una cosa o persona determinada no puedes ser feliz.

Terrific or terrifying, depending on your point of view.

Lo que te hace feliz o desdichado no es el mundo ni las personas que te rodean, sino los pensamientos que albergas en tu mente.

The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.

Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time.

He sees what other people don't." What the war did to dreamers.

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.

on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.

Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.

You remembers, boy," he says, "there is no bad weathers, only bad clothes.

Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.

What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.

Ninth-grade U.S. history: Not to hurt feelings but that chapter you assigned? That was all "Columbus is great," "The Indians sure loved Thanksgiving," "Let's brainwash everyone." I found way better stuff at the library

To be a parent and take an occasional day off from being a parent is a special kind of joy—a lightening, a sweetness made sweeter by its impermanence.

In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself.

Maybe...a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what's happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.

I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.

This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary.

So many human beings, none of them seeing clearly.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

In a child's cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon's new line is handwritten in the margin, "The world as it is is enough.

I thought they might take a break," he says. Marie-Laure is thinking of her father. "Maybe," she says, "it is even more important now?