Quotes About Perspective

The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.

Sick?--What's sick? Who is 'well'? Do you imagine, if you or I were minutely examined, we would be one hundred percent 'well'?

Thinking of such things like they'd happened years ago already and not just a few weeks back. For once life begins to accelerate it goes faster and faster.

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!

There's something about other people isn't there?--you'd like to know who they are?--you'd like to be them, maybe? People you never saw before and--my voice lifting in excitement, it's so strange how they're different from you, isn't it?--or like if somebody had the power, say somebody said to you, 'would you change places with the next person you see, a stranger just turning a corner,' I'd say, 'Hell yes.

For the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling.

Why is it when I'm inside this stone house I've come to love I can't remember what it looks like from the outside. And when I'm outside I can't remember what it looks like on the inside. Why is it I keep losing my way. The things in the back room taunting me. The views from the windows don't seem to mesh somehow.

As long as you're in motion, your perspective is obscured. Only when you reach the summit and turn to look back, can you be at peace.

We see the shadows of things, not the things themselves . . . We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn't reveal.

Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.

If this was a flirtation — and it felt like a flirtation — it was like no other flirtation in Katya's experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?

Living's immediacy, you go full sail, you're in a fever of motion. Until it's safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, Yes I was happy then, yes now it's all over I can see I was happy then. Maybe that's the advantage of dying?

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul." —

All that crap was like living your life with your face pressed up close against a mirror, you couldn't see your own face let alone anything surrounding it.

evil' is after all a relative term: there being a minor and pragmatical sort, to be disposed of as one swats a fly, and a vast, all-encompassing, one might say universal sort, that must be halted by any means at hand.

I broke a mirror and the pieces floated to China Goodbye!

No hagas caso a tu abuela, cariño. Ella es de los tiempos del cine mudo y nosotras, del sonoro.

It is deflating to realize that you are not privileged over the mold in your showerhead.

It was remarkable to Julia—(it did not hurt or offend her, but only amused her)—how Ryan's family managed to take photographs or videos of themselves that excluded her.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

Oh, it's a terrible, cruel thing—first you're young, and that takes up such a long time you think it's forever, then suddenly you're not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there's just the one way out." ? Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys

She'd perfected a method of not-seeing which was a kind of reverse social radar.