Quotes About Perspective

Yet they are unmoved when told of the cruel blow that fortune has dealt them, happy to see out their days on this unknown and unspoiled atoll. They will tell you that the view from their windows is infinitely more magnificent than Manhattan's glittering skyline.

If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.

If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.

Well it seems to me

One person's dream is another's reality.

Well, if you can't have what you want, you could try to want what you have.

wherever you sit, in whatever blend of familiar and strange, it always pays to stop and ask yourself a simple question that the bankers on the Riviera were not asking: If I was to arrive in this culture, as a total stranger, or as a Martian or child, what might I see?

When people such as Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands, they were coming from a society that was more powerful than the one they were studying. In the City of London, financiers were far more powerful than journalists or anthropologists; the challenge was how to "study up.

With people dying outside on the streets of Dushanbe, studying marriage rituals did sound exotic—if not irrelevant.

Tunnel vision is deadly. We need lateral vision. That is what anthropology can impart: anthro-vision.

At times, she feels discomfort over matters she knows nothing about, and Magsalin hears rising up in her that quaver that readers have, as if the artist should be holding her hand as she is walked through the story. But she rides the wave, she checks herself. A reader does not need to know everything

What do you call that moment when we let go of the conviction, albeit illusory, that life will only grow larger? That the horizon will always expand?

Ever notice there are no clocks in stores? It's like casinos; they don't want you to know how much time you've spent dropping your quarters.

I'm fine but, wow, thanks for asking! Very few people ask how Mom is doing; we usually get asked how baby is doing, and that's that." My simple "How are YOU?" was met with a complicated response when I asked my niece Anne what her life was like now that she had become a mom. This surprised me not at all.

There was something wrong; nobody else had to tell me. Writing it down made me see it. I'd told myself, as if writing to another person.

Civil conversations about personal perspective will be welcome in the bunker, if only because we'll be cognizant of the fact that incivility didn't work out too well, given the whole apocalypse thing.

Recognizing not only intellectually but psychologically and physically, through laughter, that we are not the only ones feeling such a range of emotions makes us feel less alone, provides a renewed sense of perspective, allows us to hit an emotional "reset" button and can relieve stress.

I imagined myself a bird, looking down on our city, the Grand Canal like a snake slithering through stone, the city on either side like two hands clasped in prayer

How do we measure a life's worth? In laughter? In orgasms? In money? In how often we have been photographed? In children borne or raised? In the number of continents on which we have made love? In number of books published? In latest versions of iPads and iPhones? In jazz albums filling a giant trunk in the basement? In years? We are all specks of dust against the specter of Time. Is ninety years so different from forty in the scheme of things? We are all the walking dead of history.

There is never only one Truth. There is only one truth at a time.

I grew up with the mistaken impression that cleverness could exempt me from anything, but middle age teaches nothing if not the lesson that nobody is exempt.

It is impossible to say whether the fact that I am instructing my husband on how to eat, or that he heeds my agitation and revulsion not at all and continues to buy tubs of meringues to slurp at will, is more indicative of the state of our marriage.

We are all specks of dust against the specter of Time. Is ninety years so different from forty in the scheme of things? We are all the walking dead of history.

So many things, when you break them down, are about perception. So many things hinge on how we choose to interpret both our own choices and the immovable forces beyond our control. So much rests on having the wisdom, and sometimes the cold-edged fucking ruthlessness, to know the difference.