Quotes About Perspective

America is not perfect, but it's much better than anywhere else in the world.

When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.

Who are you?" "I am Death," said the creature. "I thought that was obvious." "But you're so small!" "Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off-very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.

Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.

I savor bitterness - it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.

Just because it's imaginary doesn't mean it isn't real.

A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.

In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.

In his own country, Death can be kind.

Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.

A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.

We have all of us got it jumbled up. You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That is why time is a rotten jokester and no one ought to let him in to dinner.

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy, the history of a planet, the history of a person is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of glittering, occasionally peaceful light to help you follow along. Cue the music. Cue the dancers. Cue tomorrow.

Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.

I'll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we're wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss.

Endings are rubbish. No such thing. Never has been, never will be. There is only the place where you choose to stop talking. Everything else goes on forever.

Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center. But that does not mean that no other countries exist.

I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted.

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea...[T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center.

Don't you ever feel like you're just a story someone is telling about someone like you?

She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice.

What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon.

It's only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than, well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea. It's all down to girls, one way or another.