Quotes About Perspective

Why, Tanuki grumbled, would they fell trees but leave men standing? Trees are a damn sight more useful than people, and everything in the world knows that but people.

Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time.

Once, in a spasm of sappiness, you asked Q-Jo if she thought your dreams would ever come true. 'You aren't talking about dreams,' she corrected you, 'you're referring to your pathetic bourgeoisie ambitions. Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true.

In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.

In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're scrambled.

Unless it was about to cause you bodily harm, rot your rhubarb on the stalk, or carry off your children, weather ought either to be celebrated or ignored.

The most important thing is love," said Leigh-Cheri. "I know that now. There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.

If love eats the donut, does time eat the hole?

Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.

There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.

Matters are very seldom all black or white. They can even be both at the same time - The Beer Fairy

When life demands more of people than they demand of life - as is ordinarily the case - what results is a resentment of life that is almost as deep-seated as the fear of death. Indeed, the resentment of life and the fear of death are virtually synonymous. Does it follow, then, that the more people ask of living, the less their fear of dying?

Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, "Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don't do nothin' but confuse the puddin' out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you?" It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, "In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.

One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one's perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.

Actually, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

Okay, it is what it is and I am what I it, but its isness and my itness seem to be stretching the meaning of is and it.

Life is hard - if you think it's hard.

I began to hitchhike in something akin to geological time: slow, ancient, vast.

I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified.

People tend to take everything too seriously. Especially themselves.

That's the value of the artist... Even when they aren't aware, they're dreaming our dreams for us.

Switters had always seemed to take a both/and approach to life, as opposed to the more conventional and restrictive either/or.

The function of the artist," the Navajo answered, "is to provide what life does not.