Quotes About Perspective

I'm 26," 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, 19 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 19.

Essays can be such a pain! Basically, the reader isn't on your side, so you can't leave out any of the logical steps. And sometimes when a connection is delicate, the steps take too long to spell out–it just isn't possible, by the time you get to the end of the steps, the mood is lost.

There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.

How confident the other people in the class seemed to be in the rights that had been conferred on them by being there first—which was really only a matter of luck, because their aunts hadn't happened to call just then. Where, exactly, did they want me to go? Did they want me to just not exist? Was that how the Israelis and Palestinians felt about each other?

He left before she woke up—because of how disgusted he was by women's tears and prayers, "which change everything yet are really of no consequence." I thought about that a lot: about what she could have said that would have been of consequence.

I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.

Time and distance have a way of playing tricks with your best intentions.

Youth is a clearer witness to the world.

Thy left eye sees not right.

To associate art with the artist is to forfeit art, because at this moment we are pushed into the arena of self-expression, and can be recognized only by what differentiates us from others.

There is nothing more blinding than having seen the light, and nothing more tiresome than sharing it.

Most parents are so convinced of their little darling's innocence that, by proxy, in rallying for junior's purity they come to believe in their own innocence—as if duplicating oneself will make a right!

From our myopia arose our dystopia.

It is said that the depressive has a clearer view of reality than does the euphoric. Perhaps, but the euphoric has a clearer view of life.

There is nothing wrong with being fascinated by the dark side of life, and ourselves, but woe to those who think this is representative of reality. All too many of us sit in our homes watching TV, falling prey to the delusion that the world is getting worse. If these sorry individuals spent more time meeting their neighbors, they'd discover that 95% of their peers are fine people.

And that's when he saw, at last, why it was so sweet to be infinitesimal: because as we become nothing, beneath the stars, so too do our troubles.

Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy a very charming man called Liao Dong and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century. He said that I couldn't admire Mao more than he did. I asked him how Mao was viewed now. He said Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong; the Cultural Revolution didn't work. He said he had been named after Mao it was amusing.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

It doesn't do to read too much,' Widmerpool said. 'You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.

Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?' 'I don't know,' said Moreland. 'Love means such different things to different people.

There is a strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose that everyone else is having a more enjoyable time than we are ourselves;

The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives

Sometimes it is better to imagine the past than to remember it.