Quotes About Perspective

The generation gap is just another way of saying that the younger generation makes overt what is covert in the older generation; the child expresses openly what the parent represses."36 There was in the

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, How could you have believed that? because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

you can only value something if you've experienced it.

For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not.

What you don't understand is, people never believe these things. Not until they experience them. Then when they experience them they become people other people don't believe. Hard lines.

A continuity isn't necessarily right, just because it's a continuity.' 'Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is

Yes, it's because it's one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics—even such a long time ago.

students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself. And that is the whole point and the only point: the literary treasure-house has many mansions.

I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago—and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.

You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can't be anything else. You can't change that.' 'Well then, I think that's the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.' 'Then I don't follow you. And I don't want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.

The tale must be rehearsed–and we may amuse ourselves imagining how these must have been, often, acrimonious, or at least in dispute. Whose version of events is going to be committed to memory by the Memories?

I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.

Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone.

Literature is analysis after the event.

they seem unable to retain this very simple truth for long, although they have been told again and again, and this is because of another and most powerful feature of their thinking, which is that anything they are told is distorted to fit their own particular personal or group bias and then added, like another pebble to the pile of the half-truths they already cherish.

as far as I can see, everyone is mad. Do you know Matty, that's the only explanation for the world that I can see -- everyone's as mad as hatters... Mad. All of us. Everyone.