Quotes About Perspective

Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.

What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides. Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two, and those who don't.

There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.

The things you regret sometimes turn out to be the things you celebrate. In other words: You learn from what you do wrong.

I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know…" I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.

Women are always saying, "We can do anything that men can do." But men are not saying, "We can do anything that women can do.

Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, "It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.

We learn from difference, not from sameness.

a crucial purpose of birth families is to make sure we know, value, and even love people we don't agree with.

It is said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Part of traveling over years means coming back to the same place and knowing it for the first time.

But controversy is a teacher.

If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel

People before paper; stories before statistics.

I soon developed myopia and a firm belief that people in books were not only more interesting but more real than people outside of books.

the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy

childhood memories are prisms, not panes of glass. Details may loom large in the eyes of our smaller selves, while important events lie beyond our vision or understanding.

Clearly, Columbus never "discovered" America, in either sense of that word. The people who knew it were already here.

This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet

In Indian Country," he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning—and more will.

wisdom they taught me: If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.

When I'm traveling, I'm often confronted by a middle-aged white man who says something like "A black woman took my job." My answer is always "Who said it was your job?" The problem is his sense of entitlement.

If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.

When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.