Quotes About Perspective

This is what a grown-up looks like, thought September. Not like the grown-ups in my world who look sad and disappointed and grimy with work and bored with everything.

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But the birch tree reminded me of how large the world was and how unimportant was my place in it. It became a reminder: to let things be what they were, to live unsentimentally. To pare away the unnecessary neuroses, the compulsion to be at the center of every thought; to look at the world without the intervening lens of self.

No sense in being pessimistic. It wouldn't work anyway.

Some theologians argue that one kind of grace is better than another, and that some people think they're experiencing "divine" grace when it's actually just "common." To me, that's like bickering about what color God's eyes are. (They're hazel, in case you were wondering.)

How can you know things have changed, Julian, if you don't know how things were?

Once, just once, Sally had suggested that Daphne worked too hard. "And now with this big house. . ." Daphne had turned to the house, looked up at the three narrow stories, and said, "Only in New York would this be considered a big house. It has one bathroom." She turned back to her mother. "One bathroom," she said, in a kind of wonder.

It is difficult to notice your faces beyond that, partly because of the dazzling red hair but mostly because there are two of you. You understand this when you are older, when someone brings too many gifts to a birthday party or too many bottles of good wine to a dinner party, and the presents and the wine are undervalued in their own abundance. You are indistinct, undervalued in your own abundance. Sometimes

I can't decide if I want a baby. And my friends who have kids don't make very good salesmen. They're like, "Oh you learn all this great stuff, like how to survive on two hours' sleep." If I want to learn that I'll just become a political prisoner or something.

We all know how the Cinderella story ends, but trust me, that prince would have been crazy not to choose my sister.

Happily ever after, like in the books,

often when we are in the middle of a situation and emotionally involved in it, logic and common sense disappear.

Perhaps there's a barometer of happiness that registers when you've been happy for too long and brings you back in line.

Personal belief system? Is that the problem? That we've all just assumed that truth is what we individually believe? Or is it a collective assumption? That the truth for Germany-and the truth for Britain and Poland and the US- is their own, regardless of how it affects others? Is there no truth- no universal truth- that applies to everyone?

Never is a man more ready to accept the Lord than when he faces his own mortality.

Mothers send strips to daughters to make a point. Daughters smack strips down on the breakfast table to make a point. My own mom sometimes cuts a strip out and sends it to me to make sure I understand her.

When life gives you lemons, squirt someone in the eye.

If one keeps one's eyes open, it is possible to see things in many different ways.

I can see clearly now, my brain is gone. Lucy

You can't change other people: you can only change how you react to them.

Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside — children have their own agendas and timescales. As they find out more about their world and their place in it, they work hard not to let adults hurry them. We need to hear their voices.

In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it the way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet.

I didn't study the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña because I needed a sample of the "Chicano experience" like a vitamin supplement. I studied these writers and artists because they were the most interesting thinkers.

Alcoff calls this self-examination "white double-consciousness," which involves seeing "themselves through both the dominant and the nondominant lens, and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth.