Quotes About Perspective

meditations as here offered, and when we think we have

Do not be thinking of how little you have to bring God, but of how much He wants to give you.

Books—all books—are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic.

Everyone, I guess, sees their position as the neutral one and everyone else's position as biassed. I wonder why 177 minutes of the Today programme is completely secular; you feel horribly excluded by 3 minutes of Thought for Today. I see a sinister anti-religious bias when David Attenborough goes through a whole series without ever once aying On the other hand maybe God made it all; you feel that 30 minutes of hymn singing on Sunday evening amounts to theocratic oppression.)

I've got a theory. Now, hear me out. It's that our lives are half comedy and half tragedy. And for some people, it just works out that the first entire half of their lives is tragedy and then the second half is comedy.

Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material. Robert never said anything of the sort. Boredom is essential for writers; it is the only time they get to write.

A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows? Jesus, I guess so. Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It's a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that. Even gay? Even gay.

We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations;

Well"—Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads—"we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.

It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window...

That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

But what I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Because it is also mine.

Clark always says that you can be thin or you can be happy, and, Arthur, I have already tried thin.

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.

We are each the love of someone's life --- The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Life, it's so unlikely," she said, then turned to me again. "It's so much better than we think it is, isn't it?

He has nothing personal against Christ; though raised Unitarian—with its glaring omission of Jesus and a hymnal so unorthodox that it was years before Less understood "Accentuate the Positive" was not in the Book of Common Prayer—Less is technically Christian. There is really no other word for someone who celebrates Christmas and Easter, even if only as craft projects.

He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had.

Who can ever say, this is the last? Only one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time.

Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.

HE WAS NOT THE BEST BUT HE WAS THE BEST I EVER HAD

Arthur, happiness is bullshit. That is the wisdom I give you from my twenty-two hours of being fifty. That is the wisdom from my love life. You'll understand at midnight.

Just for the record, happiness is not bullshit. - Arthur Less (character)

How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?