Quotes About Perspective

I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market.

Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

We are all having different experiences.

It's easy to say something is all in your head. It's like saying a sunset is all in your eyes, she said, gesturing, pursing her mouth in small furies. It's stupid, it's nonsense. It has no brain for beauty.

No, no, I said. No, no, Nathan, not because of you. It's something ... I can't explain it to you. I've seen myself from all sides. That's a rare thing to do. I've seen you, too. I understand things, I think. What I wanted to say was: I understand that it wasn't that you didn't want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me.

What magnetic force draws us to scenes of pain, and words that wound us? You have seen this, I told myself as I marched along to that apartment. You have seen this already, you've lived through this, spare yourself

You are seeing suffering, Robert used to say when confronted with a horrible person. You are seeing someone in pain.

the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

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

It's easy to say something is all in your head. It's like saying a sunset is all in your eyes," she said, gesturing, pursing her mouth in small furies. "It's stupid, it's nonsense. It has no brain for beauty.

but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked.

I miss when my future was more interesting to me than my past

Nothing to do but laugh about it. True for everything.

Arthur Less has been out of place many times in his life... He has done them all. So being in a place of utter misrule and chaos is no problem for him. In some way, that is the comfort zone of Arthur Less. He knows, in such places, where he stands.

Arthur, you're going to have to figure something out. You see all these men over fifty, these skinny men with mustaches. Imagine all the dieting and exercise and effort of fitting into your suits from when you were thirty! And then what? You're still a dried-up old man. Screw that. Clark always says you can be thin or you can be happy, and, Arthur, I have already tried thin.

Less cannot imagine Delaware being a miracle to anyone.

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering

The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.

She looked at me – I was crying, though she was not – and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. 'Don't think you're paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,' she said to me. 'The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.

I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.

Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.

You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn't matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.

I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.

This book's conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.