Quotes About Perspective

First of all, returning from motherhood, I was looking for something lighter, and I wasn't as much attracted to Kate as I was to the relationship between the two people.

In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experience the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It's this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.

We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.

Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don't matter. There's no technological shortcut.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe.

S]kill at debate isn't the same as maturity.

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that.

Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience.

I view the world as incidental to my aims, while he cannot allow someone with enhanced intelligence to work purely in self-interest.

He considers intelligence to be a means, while I view it as an end in itself.

When Janice had spoken of the strength she had as an afflicted person, her message was rare, but now that she's eyeless, her message is commonplace.

Ana wonders if Jax's asexuality means he's missing out on things that would be beneficial for him to experience.

As I contemplated this vista, I wondered where my body was. The conduits which displaced my vision and action around the room were in principle no different from those which connected my original eyes and hands to my brain. For the duration of this experiment, were these manipulators not essentially my hands? Were the magnifying lenses at the end of my periscope not essentially my eyes? I was an everted person, with my tiny, fragmented body situated at the center of my own distended brain.

He became an adult who—like so many others—viewed God's actions in the abstract until they impinged upon his own life.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments

I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods' worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as the must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life.

People are made of stories

It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

She sees that Derek has a very different idea of high expectations than she has. More than that, she realizes that his is actually the better one. "You're right," she says, after a pause.

we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.

La gente está hecha de historias. Nuestros recuerdos no son la acumulación imparcial de cada uno de los segundos que hemos vivido; son la narrativa que hemos ensamblado a partir de momentos escogidos. Y es por eso que, aun cuando hayamos experimentados los mismos acontecimientos que otros individuos, nunca construiremos narrativas idénticas: los criterios empleados para seleccionar momentos son distintos para cada cual, y un reflejo de nuestras personalidades.

Do you now understand why I say the future and the past are the same? We cannot change either, but we can know both more fully.