Quotes About Perspective

in Nicole's mouth instead of mine?

What I'll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won't be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won't be someone I could have created by myself. —

the Europeans often believe paper over people.

if the situation of the working classes was improved in the manner he hoped, that might demonstrate to the nobility that poverty was not innate.

It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no "correct" interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.

Sometimes even bad advice can point a man in the right direction.

Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don't matter.

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. Which is why, even when we've experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives:

actual events were more complicated and less dramatic, as actual events always are, so I have taken liberties to make a better narrative. I've told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.

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

The difficulty of any trial was subjective, and there was no way to compare two individuals' experiences. And just as those whose suffering seemed greater than his should have compassion for him, so should he have compassion for those whose suffering seemed less.

The world's bumper sticker reads: Life sucks, and then you die. Perhaps Christian bumper stickers should read: Life sucks, but then you find hope and you can't wait to die.

Who's to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos." The skin of this world," he said quietly.

Where is God? Where can I find him?" we ask. We don't realize that's like a fish swimming frantically through the ocean in search OF the ocean

your history is no less important to your survival than your ability to breathe. In the end, you can only determine whether to saturate your memories with pain or with perspective. Forgetting is not an option. I tell you the truth now: Pain was not God's plan for this life. It is a reality, but it is not a part of the plan.

The problem with any philosophical consideration is that once you open a door in your mind, you can never close it. Once you learn something, you can never convince your mind that you didn't learn it. If you learn the world is round, you can never fit in with a world that thinks it's flat.

When dealing with music, the personal is the political, and always has been.

In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue and a blessing.

You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.

I have adopted the perspective that healing must embody an art with a compelling and even poetic message.

Sometimes all it takes to be happy is a dime on the sidewalk.

The eye contains the world, in a space no bigger than a baby's fist.

Boarding House The blind man draws his curtains for the night and goes to bed, leaving a burning light above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall, he hears the deaf man walking down the hall in his squeaky shoes to see if there's a light under the blind man's door, and all is right.

Where, then, does your vision of the world reside? What part of your art is drawn from history? What part is prophecy? What part is grounded in fact? What part takes wing in fantasy? These are useful questions. Do you really want to leave it to outsiders and non-artists to make up your answers for you? Many