Quotes About Perspective

I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter.

Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that.

you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.

I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control.

It was pivotal in making you but you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we understand the factors that make us do the things we do?

Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

Sometimes I think God is like weather--you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do wit you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it.

Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard, Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley,and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime. He shuddered.

For there was once a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised ever again.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

I don't understand beauty.

one of the biggest indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of the crazy genes, you don't end up crazy; you merely end up different. And it's that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successfull.

When you're young, you feel like life hasn't yet begun, like life is scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays - whenever. But suddenly you're old, and the scheduled life never arrived. I find myself asking, 'Well, then, exactly what was it I was doing with all that time I had before I thought my life would begin?

I once read that for every person currently alive on earth, there are nineteen dead people who have lived before us. That's not that much really. Our existence as a species on earth has been so short. We forget that.

Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to enourage that amnesia. (Microserfs, p 366)

She was born sad," she said. "No, that's not fair. People shouldn't be born sad, because life will do that to them anyway.

Nobody ever mentions the good side of OxyContin: It makes you feel like Jesus fucking a horse.

When hit with a genius idea, people tend to say, Well, if I sat down in a chair and really thought about it, I could have had that genius idea, too. But they didn't--and even if they'd wanted to, it could never have happened.

Poor Buoyancy: The realization that one was a better person when one had less money.

Could I ever be a Craig? No. A person must be born into Craigdom, with its multiple ski holidays, complex orthodontia, proper nutrition and casual, healthy view of recreational sex. My

I think we live in this world, but we don't change the world.

O Signore, la tua notte è così grande e la nostra rete così piccola.

I cautiously parked in front of the craft store, went inside and found the glue gun, which, back home, would cost $12.99. There in Arizona it was $1.29, which is to say, it was basically free, and at that price they should have just gone out to the freeway and hurled glue guns at passing cars.