Quotes About Perspective

did start paying attention to the unglamorous insights

Selalu ada sesuatu yang dapat dipelajari dari orang lain

States should be humble. Bureaucrats must recognise the limits of their knowledge. There is always a risk that the bird's eye view is so grand and sweeping as to induce delusions of omnipotence.

But the psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that good news tends to unfold slowly, while bad news is often more sudden.

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, puts it succinctly: "To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers."27

But we can and should remember to ask who or what might be missing from the data we're being told about.

Man-made light was once a thing that was too precious to use. Now it is too cheap to notice.

Presumably this is because we personally experience our own localities, but we rely on the news for information about the wider world.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.

Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs - the whole world gets rearranged - and even though you're pinned down by a war you've never felt more at peace.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. 'Daddy, tell the truth,'Kathleen can say, 'did you ever kill anybody?' And I can say, honest, 'Of course not.' Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.

One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about 'This whole war,' she said, 'why was everybody so mad at everybody else?' I shook my head. 'They weren't mad exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing.' 'What did you want?' 'Nothing,' I said. 'To stay alive.' 'That's all?' 'Yes.

I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucked than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experiences. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.

Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.

I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.

I hated him for making me stop hating him

Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.

Every dark cloud may well have its silver lining, but I have come to learn that every silver lining has its dark consequences.