Quotes About Perspective

The only life we know well, the one on which we are the ultimate authority, is our own. The only experience to which we can bear witness is that which we have personally endured and observed.

No Eden valid without serpent.

Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man

There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man WITH SOMETHING THE MATTER WITH HIM.

But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.

What if we had born Bushmen in the Kalahari? What if our parents had been undernourished villagers in Uttar Pradesh, and we faced the problem of commanding the attention of the world on a diet of five hundred calories a day, and in Urdu? What good is an ace if the other cards in your hand are dogs from every town

Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One

He cited me her own remark that she wrote from the protected point of view, the woman's point of view, as evidence that she went through her life from inexperience to inexperience.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner.

You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...

Money is a kind of poetry.

I am a native in this worldAnd think in it as a native thinks.

Twenty men crossing a bridge,Into a village,Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,Into twenty villages,Or one manCrossing a single bridge into a village.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes an epidemic. p901