Quotes About Perspective

You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice that I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want

Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place.

Maybe you think you'll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn't work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It's by living that you live more.

There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and the kind who don't.

I'm afraid of the quick judgements and mistakes that everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies

And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not.

she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.

That seemed a sad thing about human nature - how much more time we spend thinking about what we don' have, or have lost, than about what we have.

A lot of irrational behavior would look more rational if you could see it in the context of your whole long life.

How staunchly people rationalized the things they had, even (especially) if they didn't choose them.

Why was it there were some things you could have multiples of, like daughters and sisters, and other things you didn't, like fathers and husbands?

the hugeness of the world was a pool to dive into, not somewhere to drown.

They think of themselves as your grandparents,' he said. But call them whatever you like. James and Mary?

Diversity is a strength. It's like the shrieking radios permanently attached to bright people's ears in the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron," to prevent them from using their superior intelligence. Contrary to everything you've heard, never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a disaster.

Oddly, our mall had a small movie theater that showed foreign and independent films. I loved going there, loved how what I saw often confused or embarrassed me, how the movies there made me think in ways that only books did.

Uncle Joe says they're running around like thirty-year-olds." Claudia looked confused. "Is that supposed to be young?" "To him," I replied.

bug on the wall.

My backside is my best side

But when Danielle thinks of the future, she thinks of fifth grade, maybe sixth grade. She wishes to be able to graduate from Stoneybrook Elementary. When Kendra thinks of the future, she thinks of college, of being an adult, of becoming a writer. Kendra has a future. Danielle has a future, too, of course, but hers is much more uncertain.

Life is not fair, I had reminded myself. Everybody gets a bad break from time to time. The important thing is not what those breaks are, but how you deal with them. If I ever got as sick as Danielle, I hoped I could also be as cheerful and funny and realistic as she was.

When two people are having problems, it's hard to tell who has changed.

This, I thought, must be full of pictures of me. But it wasn't. Not exactly. It was full of pictures of Janine and me.

The burial service began. It was quite short, but Stacey remembers much more about it than I do. All I remember is thinking, as the casket was being lowered into the ground, Mimi's not in there. So I didn't cry. A bunch of men were just putting a box in the ground. That was all. Then Mom made me throw a white rose into the hole. I thought, What's the point? Mimi won't see it, but I did it anyway (since we were being formal).

You are exaggerating, Sunny. You don't know a thing about him. He is still a stranger. You may never see him again. Get over it.