Quotes About Perspective

Una vez dijo que para ser feliz había que cumplir tres requisitos previos –ser estúpido, ser egoísta y gozar de buena saludy que él no estaba seguro de cumplir más que el segundo. De modo que discutí, peleé, pero él quería creer que la felicidad es imposible; esta creencia le proporcionaba cierto extraño consuelo.

He said that there were three preconditions for happiness — stupidity, selfishness and good health

Istorija n?ra nugal?toj? melai <...>, tai veikiau išgyvenusi?j? prisiminimai, ir dauguma j? n?ra nei nugal?tojai, nei pralaim?jusieji.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.' 

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves. Dear

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old

Happiness depends necessarily on the unreality of one plane of your life: in one area ( emotional, financial, professional ), you should be living beyond your resources.

We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what 'really' happened.

History is the lies of the victors," I replied, a little too quickly. "Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.

Ljudi kažu da je život prava stvar ali ja više volim ?itanje.

Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: "If you lower your expectations, you can't be disappointed." This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a forty-five-year-old mother or a twenty-year-old daughter.

The past is the present's toy and plaything, gratifyingly unable to answer back.

Try as I could -which wasn't very hard- I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records -- in words, sound, pictures -- you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping.

yet death has an obstinate way of denying us the solutions we imagine for ourselves.

God damn it, he was thinking, this dying business is difficult. They just won't let you get on with it, not on your own terms, anyway. You have to die on other people's terms, and that's a bore, love them as you might.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

he thought he probably wouldn't have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.

Photographs were useful, but somehow always confirmed the memory rather than liberating it.

Now he could run an office—wherever, whenever—like any grooved old hacker. He kept his satisfactions to himself. And over the years he had also learned to see the point of money: what it could—and couldn't—do. There was another thing. It was a job below his qualifications. Not that he didn't take it seriously; he did. But since, professionally, he had now lowered his expectations, he found that he was rarely disappointed.

Knygos tvirtina: ji padar? tai tod?l ir tod?l. Gyvenimas tvirtina: ji padar? tai. Tik knygose viskas paaiškinama, o gyvenime ni?niekas. Nesistebiu, kad kai kurie žmon?s teikia pirmenyb? knygoms. Knygos ?prasmina gyvenim?. Visa b?da, kad jos ?prasmina kit? žmoni? gyvenim?, bet ne tav?j?.

he didn't feel pity for Macleod, despite all the humiliations and infirmities visited upon him. These he regarded as inevitabilities; indeed, he nowadays regarded most things that happened as inevitabilities.

Exhausted, emptied-out. I had no desire to tell Margaret about what had happened. I thought more often of Susie, and of the luck any parent has when a child is born with four limbs, a normal brain, and the emotional makeup that allows the child, the girl, the woman to lead any sort of life. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the newborn baby.