Quotes About Perspective

Forever was never as long as you thought it was.

You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.

Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you've got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.

children always have different parents, even in the same family.

If you want to measure the height of a mountain, the hardest part isn't finding the peak, it's figuring out where the bottom starts.

Everybody felt that history was like a book, a beginning, a middle and an end. That's not how it worked. Real life was all middle.

Life was like that. You didn't realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.

My point is that you see these people in a way that I will never see them. Your experiences are no longer my experiences. I can't guide you any longer because I don't know where you're going.

She recited the only prayer Laura had ever taught her. "God grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

membership consisted solely of sitting around and grousing about how much things had changed for the worse. All they could talk about was the good old days—how much better things had been before the coloreds ruined everything. What they didn't acknowledge was that the things that made it bad for them made it better for everyone else.

Even this far into the game, Leigh was always surprised by how fantastic it was to be a white, wealthy man.

Time turns from a straight line into a sphere and it's not until later that you can hold it in your hand and look at all the different sides, and you think, Oh, now I remember --- this happened, then this happened, then... It's only after the fact that you can pull back into a straight line that makes sense

That was how it was with abusive parents. They only remembered the good times and you only remembered the bad.

But they soften you in ways you can't imagine. It's so unexpected. They just smooth out your hard lines.

Which was a damn good thing, because if another human being treated you the way a toddler did—threw food in your face, questioned your every move, unraveled all of the aluminum foil off the roll, yelled at the silverware, made you clean shit off their ass, peed in your bed, peed in your car, peed on you while you were cleaning up their pee, demanded that you repeat everything at least sixteen times and then screeched at you for talking too much—then you would probably kill them.

God grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

Being dead is a bit like being stupid, isn't it? Easy for you, but hard for the people around you.

was a truth universally acknowledged that your mother was the only person in the world who could say, "Your hair looks nice," but what you heard was, "Your hair always looks awful except for this one, brief moment in time.

closer she got to forty, the more annoyed she was by people in their twenties.

Ben Hecht said, "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Well." Lydia took a deep breath as she prepared to sing the hokey pokey of her life story, where she put the truth in, pulled a lie out, added an embellishment, and shook it all about.

Change your language and you change your thoughts.

If we cannot defend the things of this world and if none of the relationships in which we walk the earth can withstand the criticism which reduces the whole to relativity, we can still love them and we need take the criticism no more seriously than it deserves (pp. 29, 248).

When theology recognizes one thing properly, it mis-recognizes something else all the more thoroughly.