Quotes About Perspective

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won't be shy.

Consider the truly happy people you know. I think it is unlikely that you will find that circumstances have made them happy. They have made themselves happy in spite of circumstances.

The truth is, of course, that there is a danger of being unaware of those persons and things nearest and most accustomed to us. It is not necessarily true that familiarity breeds contempt, but it does tend to make the familiar something that is taken for granted.

If people only realized what a war goes on in a child's mind and heart in a situation of this kind, I think they would try to explain more than they do

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.

starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.

Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.

Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn't been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.

How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there's no need to let anyone make it heavy for us

it was a good rule not to expect the ideal but to enjoy what is possible.

Ognuno si racconta la vita come gli fa comodo.

It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.

Non ho nostalgia della nostra infanzia, è piena di violenza. Ci succedeva di tutto, in casa e fuori, ma non ricordo di aver mai pensato che la vita che c'era capitata fosse particolarmente brutta. La vita era così è basta, crescevamo con l'obbligo di renderla difficile agli altri prima che gli altri la rendessero difficile a noi.

Lei era così, rompeva equilibri solo per vedere in quali altri modi poteva ricomporli.

Mi ero accorta da tempo che ognuno si organizza la memoria come gli conviene, tuttora mi sorprendo a farlo anch'io

Why did she talk to me about how soles were ground and not about what she read?

de pequeña sabía que nos moríamos, siempre lo he sabido, pero nunca pensé que fuera a pasarme a mí, y ahora tampoco termino de creérmelo.

reaccionaba explicándome, de hecho, que yo no había ganado nada, que en el mundo no había nada que ganar, que su vida estaba llena de aventuras diferentes y desatinadas igual que la mía, y que el tiempo sencillamente se escurre sin sentido alguno, y que era bonito solo vernos de vez en cuando para oír el sonido loco del cerebro de la una resonando dentro del sonido loco del cerebro de la otra.

Lo que antes le parecía insoportable, ahora la alegra. Tal vez debería decirle que las cosas carentes de sentido son las más hermosas

Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.