Quotes About Perspective

she was afraid she might be turning into one of those cynical people who hug old bitterness like a treasured bone to be gnawed over forever.

This is America. We're entitled to our opinions." "Wrong. This is Texas. And my opinion is the only one that counts.

Did anybody tell you that you're a few french fries short of a Happy Meal?

I'm always suspicious of really beautiful women telling us we shouldn't be worried about beauty.

I believe the world is as we choose to view it. Simple as that. Our happiness is, in the end, up to us, and to no one else.

Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first. People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.

There is not one wide happiness that reaches us all at the same time.

And just as this illness changed his life, and hers, and Claudette's and their house on rue de l'Agneau, so it changed that old, cracked globe. It felt different in her hands--smaller. She'd hold it like an egg that could break under her touch. Because now Jeanne's mind could not be on future of foreign countries, it had to be on the cutting up of food, the emptying of chamber pots. Her life moved around her father, and loving him more closely--and how could she resent this?

We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things-it's all just a different kind of the same thing.

We all go through the same things - it's just a different kind of the same thing

though I said to Harry that I didn't know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—

We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing!

No, Peters, it's all perfectly clear except a reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women.

The story of one life cannot be told separately from the story of other lives. Who are we? The question is not simple. What we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society. Had we been born to a different family, in a different time, to a different world, we would not be the same. All the lives that surround us are in us.

Marie de Hennezel, a French psychologist who works with the terminally ill, believes that "the person who can say to someone else 'I am going to die' does not become the victim of death but, rather, the protagonist in his or her own dying.

The novelist Ian McEwan, who credits fiction with providing the possibility of "imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself," argues that this process is "the basis of all sympathy": "Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.

The arrogance of sixteen! If only I had retained it!

I had not yet learned that we make our own destiny, it springs from within us. It is not the outward events but what we allow ourselves to make of them that count.

definite. Naturally, how open-minded you

An excess of fiction could make reality seem supremely dull with its crappy dialogue and lack of coincidences

If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.

From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is clear that the golden age of freethought, which stretched roughly from 1875 until the beginning of the First World War, divided Americans in much the same fashion, and over many of the same issues, as the culture wars of the past three decades.

We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to change reality. I know this. Completely. And yet. And. Yet.