Quotes About Perspective

You think you have a view of what's waiting for you just up the road, but then something happens, and you find out pretty quick you were looking at the wrong road.

After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down...but really what would have been the point in that? Everything passed, she would too. This perspective offered her an unexpected clarity she nearly enjoyed, but even with this new clarity the world offered no more explanation for itself than it ever had.

Unless you were high up in a building or happened to glimpse it at the end of one of the big avenues going east-west, all you knew of the sunset was a darkening in the air. No wonder people in New York were so unbalanced. They were totally untouched by the rhythms of nature. You were only aware of nature when something extreme happened, like a snowstorm or heatwave.

It was the opposite of what you always heard, that no one could change a person. It wasn't true. It was only through other people that one ever did change.

But even the venerable Zen teacher Robert Aitken Roshi, in an interview about being old—he was in his eighties at the time—admitted with a laugh, "I often feel like a young person who has something wrong with me." It

The nearer I get to death, the more alive I feel. The more I consider my own mortality, the less afraid I am of dying. And the older I get, the more readily I can put myself aside.

There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany's lead [in dealing with it's past human rights crimes]. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust the democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations' media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world.

By the time you are old enough to pick up a book like this one, you have learned it: the world is not your world, and you don't have another. (p.107)

Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it.

DeWaal and others have shown that primates have the capacity most basic to moral development: the ability to put yourself in others' shoes. The feeling of sympathy, the capacity for gratitude, the sense of justice all start right there.

If you invite representative voices, shouldn't you listen to them, even when their claims are at odds with what you want to believe? West German beliefs about East Germany are so tenacious that the subjects of concern went unheard. In America, when white people tell black people how to feel about their own history, it's called whitesplaining. There isn't a word for it in German.

Talking to him was like engaging in a fistfight with someone gazing at himself in the mirror while punching you.

At this point I realized it was just as well that I never saw a ghost orchid, so that it could never disappoint me, and so it would remain forever something I wanted to see.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it.

You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.

Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida

Good quote: Lee was thirty-nine, still what we would consider a fairly young man, but for the dog-for all dogs- time dashes forward at a speed we humans can hardly perceive, until the day we realize that the puppy is no longer a puppy and has outpaced us. And yet a part of us lags behind, still seeing that old dog as a young dog even when he is standing at life's finish line.(less)

Sometimes we get this great gift, man, and we just take it for granted. We only figure it out, how much we lost, when it's gone. —Short Sammy

Sometimes we get this great gift, man, and we just take it for granted. We only figure it out, how much we lost, when it's gone.

That's the difference between people like you and people like me. You think everything's sad. Because all you do is THINK about stuff all the time. If you only think about stuff half the time you're way less sad. What do you do the other half of the time? When you're not thinking? Uh, I don't know, maybe have a life?

I realized that in depression, nothing matters," she said. "And in sadness, everything matters.

There is a way, however, to turn poison into medicine. Depending on how it's used, a single substance can be either poisonous or medicinal.

Don't let an outside influence, especially one as powerful as the media, direct your energies to the wrong place.

I used to be a blanket - without seams - a silk cocoon of happy dreams. Now I'm a quilt, no square the same a patchwork of pleasure and pain