Quotes About Perspective

This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.

What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn't have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.

What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?

Have you ever noticed," Rosalie asks, "that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?

My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face.

The sunset you see is always better than the one you don't. More stars are always better than less.

At twenty-two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.

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

What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering.

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

Cada cual tiene su Austen particular

The other important thing to understand is that as humans we see only a segment of reality in the greater cosmic scheme of things, so we are really never in a position to judge anyone or anything.

Sometimes the most worthwhile things are right in front of our eyes. We just make them hard because we think that gives them more value.

Every miracle's got a mundane explanation. [...] and you can choose - you can look at the wonderous surface or you can look at the crud beneath. I want to see the wondrous, believe me. I just know it isn't going to be there when I've finished looking.

the best way to stop worrying about your inevitable demise is to dwell on it morbidly until you're so bored that you forget it.

Why doesn't the fact that I'm human matter to human beings

I know genes are a big deal, son, but they're not the be-all and end-all. Rob slowed to a halt at the lights, wishing the dickhead behind would back off. If they were, you'd be in a seafood salad and I'd be in prison.

didn't have a mother or a father, but a stranger willingly chose me to be his son. You had a mother and father, and they let strangers take you. No, General, don't pity me. You're the one who's had the worse deal." It was shocking and it was true. The extraordinary clarity of his assessment hit her so hard that she almost gasped. It told her things she didn't want to know about herself. None of them changed her intentions.

Kig-Yar didn't think like humans, though. They'd tried imperial culture once and decided it wasn't for them. Maybe they were right: humans were constantly in denial about their ape-sized social circles, always pretending they could think on a global scale when history proved every time that they really couldn't.

Two wrongs—not equal to or more than a right (...) Good luck with quantifying a unit of right or wrong.

Real evil wasn't about bending the law to suit justice: evil was acting out of small, intensely personal expedience and losing sight of the bigger picture so often that you never got it back again.

Don't be so openminded your brain falls out.

Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.

When somebody dies, you forget they're an asshole.