Quotes About Perspective

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

The body she inhabited during the day was not hers but rather a reflection from other people's eyes.

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia's alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

That's what I always tell myself when I'm being fact-checked, and some detail I was attached to turns out not to be true. I'm initially disappointed, and maybe discouraged that now there's more work for me to do, but I know that 99.9% of the time there's actually something there, in the truth, that's more interesting than whatever I or anyone else can make up.

I'm twenty-six," she said, as if it were bad news she had received only recently. "It isn't the age I feel like." "What age do you feel like?" "Nineteen -- like you." But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year -- maybe as many as seven years -- to learn to feel nineteen.

it was not a] circle—just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE. I thought Euclid would have been mad. "That's so typical of your attitude," Svetlana said. "You always think everyone is angry. Try to have some perspective. It's over two thousand years after his death, he's in Boston for the first time, they've named something after him—why should his first reaction be to get pissed off?

Europe was so small. It seemed weird that people took it so seriously.

It was weird what was enough to make you feel good or bad, even though your basic life circumstances were the same.

It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea.

I felt a wave of nausea to realize that I had propagated these stories just by telling Svetlana what was going on—just because I had wanted to tell some other person the basic events of my own life.

I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia's alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money.

Quality of life": as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.

Whenever I am worried about anything," said this guy Ben,"I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important." I acknowledged that this was a great comfort.

I never thought to differentiate between you and the person who writes your letters. But I think I see your point. I send you an email: how do you know who wrote it? It could be anyone. There's no way for me to convince you. I say, "It's me!"; you say: "Who's 'me'?" Wouldn't it be amazing if it turned out that we both had ghostwriters? Just imagine them taking a long walk together, walking and walking, and talking only if something came up...

You have a lot of time, you don't need to be in a hurry." That's what the deans said, when you tried to take five classes. Easy for them: they were already deans. Either that was something they wanted to be doing, in which case they could afford to relax; or it wasn't what they had wanted to be doing, and now they were invested in preventing anyone else from accomplishing anything, either.

Already we were competing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn't a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.

Anyway, how could therapy even work on me, when I was so far from sharing Svetlana's therapist-like belief that people should be healthy and well-adjusted, that they should go to bed at the same time every night, even if they were reading or having an interesting conversation, or that it was great and life-affirming to go hiking with some guy, or to get married? Of course therapy worked for someone who believed those things.

How could a thirteenth-century person have written such things? If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee. On the other hand, why couldn't Rumi have said that?

Joining the literary magazine hadn't previously occurred to me. I didn't want to be an editor, or run a magazine, so why would I want to do a fake version of those things in college?

There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to use -mi?, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.

My father says that surviving a war makes you either very bitter or very frivolous.

In the end I signed up for a different Spanish film seminar, taught in Spanish, by an adjunct instructor. The adjunct instructor also said stupid things, but they were in Spanish, so you learned more.