Quotes About Perspective

Ye ken, it's the living and no' the dead who know the truth. The dead still beileve it was worth dying for.

Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house.

So do you want to fly?" he asked. "Because it's faster and cheaper." "No," I said. I tried to explain to him that the overnight train would offer a more complete Indian experience for our family and for Sophie's friend Isabel. He looked at me as if I had told him that I was hoping to contract syphilis in order to better understand what it was like to have a venereal disease.

If your $99 printer breaks and you have to pay out of pocket to fix or replace it, this will not meaningfully change your life.

The same data can (and should) be interpreted entirely differently if one changes the unit of analysis. We don't care about poor countries; we care about poor people.

The irony is that more data can often present less clarity.

My leg hurts, I wonder if it's cancer? There's a bump. I'm starting to sweat. Stop sweating. I've got to stop sweating. Can she see it dripping down my forehead? She looked at my hair line. She thinks I'm bald.

Compare this to any mess written by Charlie Kaufman.

Would that I could be a gay man. I would like myself better. But I am the most heterosexual of all my many acquaintances.

Everyone walks carrying a hoop of his own horizons, large or small (since scales differ) and more or less illuminated by his own understanding. What resemblance or relationship his world has to the real one, none can know. But the one sure-thing bet is this: The world I really believe in does not, it cannot, it never will coincide with reality.

But if other people are irritable, we may divorce their behavior from their experiencing. We can't feel their experience; and so we judge their behavior. If we think, "She shouldn't be so arrogant," we only see her behavior and judge it, because we have no awareness of what is true for her

At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see.

It's the play of our minds, of conceptualization about anything that happens to us, that is the problem. There's nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

I don't appreciate people who celebrate their dog's birthdays with dog parties, and then invite their friends who don't even have dogs. I understand why people like dogs, and I think they definitely bring more to the table than cats or those godforsaken ferrets, but I don't think it's healthy for people to treat their dogs like they are real people.

It became clear when I got in my car that Persians are only really good for two things. Oil and hummus.

And by the way, the fact that she's not speaking to anyone in her family is a pretty good indicator that she is the problem.

A homeless man with a dog approached us and put his hand out. This happens to be something I have a real problem with: homeless people with pets who approach you for food. How can they have the nerve to beg for food when they have a perfectly delicious dog standing right there? I didn't care if this guy understood English or not. Tell me when you're out of dog, buddy. Then we can talk about splitting a falafel.

Everything with me had always been black and white. Life or death. I wanted more gray. I wanted to learn how to forgive.

I had to leave my parents to love them again. I had to move across the country to appreciate that I actually had any pull toward them - that I needed them. I had to get away from them in order to come back to them. I'd like to say they did the best they could, but that couldn't have been their best. I wasn't doing my best either, so the idea that everyone is always doing the best they can is a trope. Some people are just interested in surviving; doing their best doesn't even occur to them.

My time in heaven was up, and I was being told I wasn't the marrying kind by someone who undresses for a living.

She cried the first time she was pulled over by a cop. I explained to her that there is no reason to cry when getting pulled over--unless you're coming directly from from a crime scene.

I tried to think of a worse experience I had had in my life, and all I could come up with was a James Franco art exhibit.

for someone who's lived with privilege their whole life, equality feels like a loss.