Quotes About Perspective

I just think it's odd how we parse out our empathy," he said. "Why we only have empathy for those who remind us most of ourselves. I'm not saying I don't understand it. Sure, it's easy to have empathy for someone who's just like us. It comes naturally. I just think it's a shame we can't take it a bit further. I can't help wondering what the world would be like if our empathy muscle were a bit more developed.

sex is what you make it, and we have always made do. To assume sex must take place within touching distance seems, to me, limited thinking.

when you're thinking bad thoughts about yourself, to remember that they might turn out to be wrong.

It flitted through her mind without actual words that skin is an odd thing for the world to make a fuss about, especially when, with your eyes closed, it all feels more or less the same.

The world will still be a place where people do terrible things. But here's the thing about despair. We fall into despair when the terrible gangs up on us and we forget the world can also be wonderful. We just see terrible everywhere we look. So what you do for your friend is you bring up the wonderful, so both are side by side. The world is terrible and wonderful at the same time. One doesn't negate the other, but the wonderful keeps us in the game. It keeps us moving forward.

I mean you can't change his mind. You can't change anybody's mind. No matter what you say to them. The sooner you figure that out, the happier your life will be." "But

I'd been focusing strongly on green since my days in pasture seeing through the eyes of a horse.

I wondered if my life would have turned out all differently if my hair had been blonde and baby-fine. If I'd been naturally pretty and tall like the ladies across the road.

Addict logic," Yolanda said, not missing a beat. "Life viewed through resentment.

When somebody holds a view that seems to make no sense, know that it makes sense to them, but for reasons you don't know anything about yet. And I guess in a lot of cases, you never will.

And the best way to make someone unhappy, if not downright unbalanced, is to tell her that what she sees with her own eyes is not there at all.

if you meet someone you don't like, or who doesn't treat you right, try to reserve judgment, because you don't know what that person's going through,

world is terrible and wonderful at the same time.

But the problem was, I tried to get him to do things that would be the right things for me to do. But I don't think they were the right things for him. I was trying to help him the way I thought he should be helped, but he's not me.

I think about the time Mitch asked me why I was such a happy little guy. I was five years old. Pearl had been gone a few weeks. I thought really hard for an answer even though I think he'd gone about his business without expecting one. Then I said, "I think it's because my mother loves me so much." He gave me this look of utter pity, like I was the bravest kid in the world. He missed the point completely, you know?

It depends how important it is to them to see things differently.

If you think having and losing is so bad, try never having. Now that's devastating.

And in this one perfect but probably fleeting moment . . . nothing in my life has ever been a mistake.

Maybe you hate a thing more than anything. But it's what is. To accept it means to see that it is that way, and that it won't be another way no matter how much you hate it.

Thank you. I'm honored. Most people pay very little attention. People are funny, don't you think? I used to play for the philharmonic, and people would pay good money for those tickets. Big money. But I sit out here and play the same music, and most people won't even flip me a quarter as they walk by. Same music. Just a different sense of how much they should value it.

I see my privilege because I have lived both with it and without it. The jury did not even see. They did not even see, Raymond. What can you do with a world where people do not even see?

How could a person go to the store, buy everything she needed—and wanted, from the look of some of those carts—and still seem dissatisfied? What more did they need to be happy, then? If all this wouldn't do it?

Living long is a gift denied to many, and so it comes with a responsibility to make the most of it. At very least to appreciate it. People gripe about growing older—their aches and pains, how much harder everything is—as if they had forgotten that the alternative is dying young." She picked up her fork

First I think, how weird is this? Sitting in the park holding hands with a complete stranger. Then I decided that there are a lot of weird things in the word, and this is not the very worst of them.