Quotes About Perspective

Gertrude Stein said, "As everybody knows, fathers are depressing but our family had one." Mine had two and both in their mildest forms were depressing

It is not 2006 all over the world. So who are you in a place where 1950 or 1920 is about to arrive?

Kiedy zapyta?am mojego przyjaciela jakie miejsce do zamieszkania uwa?a za najlepsze, odpowiedzia?: Nigdzie, ko?o gdzieb?dzia.

My dad, who my mom always refers to as DH for Darling Husband, was protrayed as a 'let's look on the bright side of things' kind of guy, the pillar my everbumbling mother leans on in times of distress.

Kad god poželiš nekoga kritizirati, rekao mi je, samo se sjeti da svi ljudi na svijetu nisu imali prednosti koje si ti imao.

If you were sad about something that hadn't happened yet you couldn't be disappointed.

My pain is ugly, Angel Juan. I feel like I have so much ugly pain,' says Witch Baby in a dream. 'Everyone does,' Angel Juan says. 'My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.

Take my eye, I say. I have another.

Guardate quanto gli uomini ingannano loro medesimi: ciascuno reputa brutti e peccati che lui non fa, leggieri quegli che fa; e con questa regola si misura spesso el male e el bene, più che col considerare e gradi e qualità delle cose.

And what good has all your reading done you? Out of all the things you have read, how much has really stayed in your soul, what roots have grown there that will, in a good time, bring forth fruit? Examine your heart carefully. If you compare the whole of what you know with what you don't know, you will find that your knowledge is like a small stream dried up in the summer heat compared to the ocean of your ignorance. And even granted that you do know a lot, what difference does it make?

She'll probably have all the work made up and a dozen stories written for The Oracle before I finish that one stupid book report on Moby Dick. I mean, Todd, who really cares about whales?' Todd did, but he let the comment slide by.

Everything works out for the best. It's one of those things we say to comfort ourselves. A phrase that gets repeated so often we cease to question the absence of logic inherent in the statement. Since we have no way of knowing what the alternate reality might have been, we have no way of knowing if things worked out of the best or not.

If you turned sideways and stuck your tongue out, you could probably pass for a zipper.

My mom used to say that a poor person who gave a dime to charity was more generous than a rich one who gave hundreds of dollars.

You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written.

Once we know that something turned out all right, that we navigated a rough patch more or less intact, it becomes harder to pity our younger self or remember the grief and confusion, the dread of the disaster that didn't happen, the panic of the deer frozen in the headlights of the car that stopped in time.

Literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none.

You think, Fuck it. The guy's a genius. He deserves her. What is a woman, after all? You are alive and in Paris.

I wanted to know what he thought about my loving a man whose bills were being paid by another woman.

Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture.

Margot used to like describing men as 'my unhappy love affair.' But hadn't that presumed the existence of a happy love affair that made the others unimportant? What is unhappy is the only kind Margo ever has?

Books are not cake—you and I can devour the same book, and there it remains for us and others to devour all over again.

Stories aren't about things. Stories are things. Stories aren't about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.

She'd written a book, and I hadn't, even if her novel was worse than anything I would have written.