Quotes About Perspective

Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way.

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be happy to read them.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?

Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

The sun of that chilishness goes on shining even when the larger bodies of hotter stars have risen to smelt you and cover you with their influence. The recenter stars may be more critical, more in the eye, but that earlier sun still remains a long time.

I don't know how it all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling how I picked them from the air.

I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird.

don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery. Yes, thought Wilhelm, suffering is the only kind of life they are sure they can have, and if they quit suffering they're afraid they'll have nothing.

But it's a tiresome preoccupation, self-esteem. Something has to be done to limit the number of people whose opinions can affect us.

But in the end I said, 'It's terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation.

I quit thinking long ago that all old people came to rest from the things they were out for in their younger years.

Death is good for some people.

There I stretched out on the low bed and remained for days, sick. If Tertullian came to the window of heaven to rejoice in the sight of the damned, as he said he'd do, he might have seen my leg across his line of vision through the sunlight. That was how I felt.

I would as lief look upon a piece of pastrami-stained paper as on the face of Alfred Kazin.

But when he sat down for a moment on the bed, all the comedy of it was snatched away and torn to pieces. He was wrong about the woman's expression: he was trying to transform it into something he could bear. The truth was probably far different. He had started out to see what had happened with her eyes and had ended by substituting his own, thus contriving to put her on his side.

Što se ti?e njegovog odnosa prema mrtvima, taj je zaista bio vrlo loš. On je doista vjerovao da mrtvima treba prepustiti da pokopaju svoje mrtve. I da je život samo onda život kada se nedvosmisleno shva?a kao umiranje.

Sre?a je besmislen pa ?ak i škodljiv pojam ako nije doista sveobuhvatna...

Pretpostavimo da sam ja apsolutno u pravu a da monsignor, na primjer, ima potpuno krivo. Ako sam ja u pravu, problem suvislosti svijeta, i sva odgovornost za nju, postaju moji.

Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.

But I wasn't inclined to go out of my way to defer to so many critics. I had a good grasp of reality and of my defects. I permanently kept in mind the approach of Death, who might at any time loom up before you.

never could see what was so disgraceful about 'stiffening in a rented house,' as Eliot wrote. Do you croak better on your own property?

France, they have no life at home, home is disgusting, and they need to see themselves in a French light only. This applies to somebody like Cioran or even our friend—your friend—Grielescu. They hope to turn into Frenchmen. But your wife is even more peculiar . .

And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries.

me for years that democrats take a low view of themselves, and are brought up to believe they're insignificant. But turn that around and you come out with megalomania, and we've seen plenty of examples of that too.