Quotes About Perspective

One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.

Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown.

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

You can't assume that you know why what you're doing matters. You can't at least declare failure immediately, because consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.

In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll's self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring beaters and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent.

Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.

If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won't become yours, but you will become its - its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender.

Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

We are winning," said the graffiti in Seattle, not "We have won." It's a way of telling in which you can feel successful without feeling smug, in which you can feel challenged without feeling defeated.

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them.

Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it.

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter

Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.

A desk is no place to think on the large scale.

But there isn't actually a most beautiful person in the world, because there are so many kinds of beauty.

PomyÅ›lcie, jak wiele czasu i energii mogÅ'ybyÅ›my poÅ›wiÄ™ci? najró?niejszym wa?nym sprawom, gdybyÅ›my tylko nie byÅ'y a? tak zajÄ™te samym przetrwaniem.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning.

That circle became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you're closest, sometimes the only way is the long one.

We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is.

the landscape never looks the same coming and going, so turn around periodically and look at the view you'll see coming back.

There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either.

The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far.