Quotes About Perspective

The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.

A ten-year-old boy doesn't want a hyper-dexterous giant to choke, just as a ten-year-old girl doesn't feel good when Britney Spears has a nervous breakdown on live TV. Only an adult can feel good about someone else's failure.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.

This is a very common paradigm held in small towns. If somebody who grew up in your community wins a Nobel Prize, you cut out the newspaper story and put it on the bulletin board; if someone from your town grows up and becomes America's most depraved serial rapist, you cut out the newspaper story and put it on the bulletin board. It's just nice to see someone doing anything.

At some point, if you live long enough, it's probably impossible to avoid seeming crazy.

Well, that's how it always seems, until it doesn't.

There's simply no way around the limited ceiling of my own mind.

Its easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

Find good in what the world says is evil.

It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

Everyone's in their own personal coma.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.

Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

The joke is, we all have the same punchline.

Young people want mirrors. Older people want art.