Quotes About Perspective

At first, I thought it was because I was raised with all this Chinese humility... Or maybe it was because when you're Chinese you're supposed to accept everything, flow with the Tao and not make waves. But my therapist said, Why do you blamd your culture, your ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we shoudl have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age.

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

I sat down and remembered a saying Old Aunt used to tell me whenever I complained that I had been wrongly accused: "Don't strike a flea on a tiger's head." Don't settle one trouble only to make a bigger one.

How can I argue with someone who makes no sense?

And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age.

My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was as if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said fate, because she couldn't pronounce the th sound in faith. And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.

I am crying now, sobbing and laughing at the same time, seeing but not understanding this loyalty to my mother.

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

She said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.

Pero yo estaba muy mimada por su culpa. Nunca me había enseñado a tener en cuenta sus sentimientos y por ello el ama sólo era para mí alguien que me ofrecía comodidad, como un ventilador en verano o una estufa en invierno, una bendición que sólo aprecias y quieres cuando ya no está presente.

Why did I need to see someone else's bad luck? To feel glad it was not mine? To scare myself into thinking it still might be?

Now you see why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy.

I asked myself, What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person? And then I saw the curtains blowing wildly, and outside rain was falling harder, causing everyone to scurry and shout. I smiled. And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wing. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried the water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside. It caused men to yelp and dance.

Qué era peor, nos preguntábamos entre nosotras, sentarnos y esperar la muerte con el rostro apropiadamente sombrío, o buscar una manera de ser felices a pesar de todo?

I realized then that we miss so much of life while we are part of it. We fail to see ninety percent of the glories of nature, for to do so would require vision that is simultaneously telescopic and microscopic.

Qué es el pasado si no aquello que elegimos recordar?

ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age.

Later, Miss Banner pointed to a man trying to squeeze a barrel that was too large through a doorway that was too small. Hope. Miss Banner said. But to me, this was not hope, this was stupidity, rice for brains. ... I wondered whether foreigners had feelings that were entirely different from those of Chinese people. Did they think all our hopes were stupid?

Of cicadas, she would say that they looked like dead leaves fluttering, felt like paper crackling, sounded like fire roaring, smelled like dust rising, and tasted like the devil frying in oil.... You see, in five ways she could sense the world... But it was always the sixth way, her ... sense of importance, that later caused troubles between us. Because her senses led to opinions, and her opinions led to conclusions, and sometimes they were different from mine.