Quotes About Perspective

If you were forced to drink a beaker of di-hydrogen oxide, your response would probably be negative. If you asked for a glass of water, you might enjoy it. That's right. There's no difference on the palate. The difference, in the brain.

Sometimes all you had to do was breathe to ruin somebody's else's day.

The patron saint of Viking could not stand editors who claimed to have discovered an author. "The author is not a discovery," Huebsch always insisted. "The author is the discoverer." Maybe so, but I still maintain that it is the editor who has to dig out the pearl in the sand pile and clean it up.)

I thought it was endearing when we first got together. By the end I wanted to stab him in the hand every time he dismissed my cursing as an uncreative vocabulary. I think being able to use one little four letter word to convey a hundred different thoughts is pretty fucking creative.

What is a thousand years Time is short for one who thinks, endless for one who yearns.

En réalité, les motifs qu'on a d'être heureux ou malheureux sont sans poids; tout dépend de notre corps.

What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.

A collection of errors does not make a truth: quality cannot stem from quantity – a value is not a weight. The reasons of the majority cannot be taken as good reasons .

The world only hides on thing, says Clément Rosset, and that is that it has nothing to hide. It is sufficient onto itself for its own unveiling. Meaning only appears as the result of the representations and interpretations man may give to it.

When you look at the Moon, you think, "I'm really small. What are my problems?" It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

The people who criticise you will not be the ones taking care of your legs when you are in your wheelchair. People who never drove a car in these conditions, they just don't know.

I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.

If a rattlesnake thinks he can swallow a mouse, he probably can. Don't assume you think like a snake unless you are one.

The person who's communicating something is responsible for how well the other person follows him.

Aristotle is often quoted as saying that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's true, but I don't think that's the whole story. After all, a dead cat has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

I didn't know it, but what I was really looking for was compassion. Not consciously of course. I didn't consciously want to become compassionate. Who in his right mind would give up his place at the center of the universe? Compassion is scary. If you open up too much to people, they have power over you and make you i things for them. Better to keep them at a distance ...

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I'm willing to let them change me, something happens between us that's more interesting than monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out how life works, too.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.