Quotes About Perspective

What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.

There is more than one history of the world.

Sometimes the snake's-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

Circumference = nowhere; center point =

the snake's-hands in a story can be the best part.

He had thought the story was *theirs*, People's, that he was in it by chance, somehow impelled into it by reasons not his, that it was a thing torn out of Ymr that shouldn't be in Ka at all. But Kits was right, it was he who'd been in it, not People, however much they wanted to be and he had not. It was his story, and the stories about the story were his too. He was girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was through.

Inside it seemed much larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't tell which.

Well, you know, it's probably not the first time it ever happened in the world," she said.

She slipped from her tall chair (why don't we remember living in a world where everything was absurdly outsize, tables and chairs and spoons, door knobs too high to reach, too fat to grasp?) and went to look.

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?

What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all.

It's like those high-school yearbook photos that everyone would rather not see: Oh my God, look at that mullet hair. I have those photos too, but for me, they're, like, entire movies. And they show them on cable.

Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it's helpful. So the fact that there won't be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that'd be helpful.

never sit in the first row at the ballet.

What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?

My grandmother's is the world that dropped the bomb—itself a slick object—so elegantly smooth it managed to slip past American consciousness, past enemy lines.

I do not recommend ignorance and I am not saying that there is no truth, but I am arguing that the best way to think about truth is to call it the best interpretation that anybody has come up with yet while conceding that no one knows what is coming next. There are lots of competing truths battling with one another for their place in the sun, and the truth is that we have to learn to cope with the conflict. The skies do not open up and drop The Truth into our laps.

From the individual doctor's perspective, it is far better to do whatever it takes to avoid litigation, even if it doesn't seem to be the right thing to do, than to risk entanglement in this crazy system.

It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.

The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money.

Thinking is a very natural process, but we are so easily conditioned by our thinking and give too much value to it. Maezumi Roshi

If we think we have found truth for ourselves, above all things, let us not impose it on one another. Let us lock upon it all the doors of consciousness. For however inspiring it may be to us, however ennobling, when once we try to impose it on another it becomes a poison.

We can't go far in morality before realizing that right is a relative thing and that those who disagree with us may be striving for it as earnestly as we are ourselves. It is the spirit that counts.

It's not the last day that matters the most. It's the ones in between. The ones you get the chance to look back on. They're the carnation days. They may not stand out the most at first, but they stay with you the longest.