Quotes About Perspective

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them

I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.

Probably he was thinking what a boring bollocks I was. Plenty of people think the same thing- all of them are teenagers, mentally if not physically. Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more then enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.

You can knock down a genuine belief, if you load up with enough facts that contradict it; but a belief that's built on nothing except who the person wants to be, nothing can crumble that.

Mental' isn't a reason. It comes in an awful lot of flavors, most of them are non-violent, and every single one of them has some kind of logic, whether or not it makes sense to you and me.

I didn't even try to explain to him what I was seeing, the fine spreading web through which we had all tugged one another to this place, the multiple innocences that make guilt.

When you look at someone you knew when you were young, you always see the person you first met,

If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it.

But that age; remember that age? They're not the same. They don't put things together. That's why half of what they do looks full-on certifiable, to you or me or any sane adult. Things don't make sense, when you're that age; you don't make sense. You stop expecting to.

You don't have to like your family, you don't even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.

What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely.

There's optimistic, and then there's plain crazy.

You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie.

All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion [...] none of the scenery looked familiar anymore.

In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they've zipped past you:

It would take a while to occur to him that my rules had sweet fuck-all in common with his.

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child's drawing. Possibly those earnestly efficient man-made woods are in fact like that; I wouldn't know.

Whatever people do, right up to killing, nature absorbs it, closes over the fissure and goes on about its own doings. He can't tell whether this is a comforting thing or a melancholy one.

Honestly it wasn't Susanna I was tired of, not really; it was me, wronged innocent, white knight, cunning investigator, killer, selfish oblivious dick, petty provocateur, take your pick, what does it matter? it'll all change again

If a guy's whole head is in reality, then reality is the only route we can take to get to him. If he's letting his mind prance off down dozens of twisty hypothetical fairy tales, every one of those is a crack we can use to prize him open.

My granddad was after dying the month before that, of a stroke. That took him four days. Life seems like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it's gone in a few sec- and, it looks awful small all of a sudden. We don't like to face up to that, but the animals know it. They've no notions about their dying. It's a little thing, only, you'd get it done in no time. All it takes is one nip from a fox.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world—we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us.