Quotes About Perspective

But she did believe that the fundamentals of most people remained the same throughout their lifetimes. People who were generous usually remained generous, unless life taught them not to be. And people who saw the world through the prism of their own needs first and foremost would always be that way.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: I do not want to call pop soda. I do not want to eat gloppy banana mush. I do not want to be it. "I'm pretty sure the way I play is the right way," I say, my throat tightening. I'm right. I am.

I guess people can be wrong and right at the same time.

Maybe we should hear Jack's plan first," Jonah says. "He hasn't even thought of one," I say with an edge. "I'd like to hear Abby's idea," Jack says. Right answer, kid. "Yeah, me too," Jonah says, smiling at Jack. I give Jonah the side-eye.

Just to make sure it wasn't cancer. Or a heart attack. Or lymphangioleiomyomatosis. Which, sure, only affected one out of a million people, but it started with a cough, and if you were the one out of a million, then you were done-like-dinner within the year.

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

Not everything needs to be a powerful statement about character or society or whatever. Sometimes, things are the way they are and nothing more.

Um, I asked, isn't the whole point about being a slave that you don't have a choice to be anything else? Prettying up the word slave with the adjective-noun constructions makes enslaved African sound nonchalant. As in Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.

In Woody Allen movies people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or Holocaust documentaries talking up media theory to pass the time. At 16 that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don't debate theory. They talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme. I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said On the Road. He smiled, said, That was my favorite book at sixteen. At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.

Tacking an object up on a wall changes things.

It says something about the ugliness of September 11, 1777, that this boy woke up a Lutheran and went to bed a Quaker.

Never underestimate the corrective lens that is sentimentality.

The happiness that follows sadness is never the same as that which came before it.

I am invariably the odd man out on tours like this. The only people who take them are kids who are forced to endure them and elderly retirees. I am always either the oldest person on a tour, or the youngest. I prefer to be the youngest if only because usually that means I'm the prettiest by default.

If truth were a crayon and it was up to me to put a wrapper on it and name it's color, I know just what I would call it-dinosaur skin.

If truth was a crayon and I had to name it, I would call it dinosaur skin.

Assumptions are often wrong.

In my experience nobody gets to lead a totally charmed existence. Nobody escapes the pitfalls of being a human being. It's what seperates us from the zebras. Or that's my theory anyway

If I were in their place, I'd fall over myself.

How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.

Guys like you make life easy for some women.

And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.

Being right was largely a matter of explanations.