Quotes About Perspective

then tossed the coat into the water. "Hurst! That's a perfectly good coat!" "Yes, and I have a perfectly good life. One of those two things is not replaceable.

No matter what station you hold in life, there will always be things that will surprise you. Whether you choose to be outraged or delighted is up to you.

Numbers people don't like being rushed, so back off.

You and I are from two different worlds. Nonsense. We have much in common. We both like books, dogs, poems, Sir Walter Scott, dogs - I could go on. You listed dogs twice. It does not matter; I still made my point. No, you haven't.

Beth sighed. "I want a relationship, but then again…I don't." To her surprise, Grandfather cackled. "That's quite normal, my girl. Quite normal indeed. There are no guarantees in this life. You have to take what you can get and enjoy it while you have it.

When it's a memory, you already know the outcome, so we believe it was an easier time. Looking forward is much more uncertain, and so feels more complicated. But I don't think it is. Not really.

It's sad, but life is not fair. I sometimes think it was never supposed to be. Life is made up of moments, good and bad. But while you don't get to pick all the moments, you do get to pick which ones you cling to.

The dolphin, they live for today. But I am human. To be human is to live for tomorrow. Why does tomorrow matter? What is important is now.

No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time

The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't

It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.

It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.

An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

the happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.

It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her.

I'm seeing so much of America today," Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him — whenever things were not to his liking, he'd say that — I'm seeing so much of America today.

Here is my objection to submarines and space travel: not enough windows. What difference does it make if you're in outer space or underwater, or wherever, if you can't feel, or hear, or see or smell it?

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.

We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus points for those who get all the way to insects.

I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.

Reading Austen is a frickin' mine field.

My brother and sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn't there, and I can't tell you that part. I've stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that's mine, and still everything I've said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story. The only reason I'm the one telling it is that I'm the one not currently in a cage.