Quotes About Perspective

There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.

So here I am. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it.

this is the upside of already being eternally damned

Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.

With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out. Long-term or short-term? she asks. Both. Long-term, she says, we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after. Really? Really, she says. So don't sweat it.

If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane.

Listen up. Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.' Sometimes Rant said, 'You only ever is in the eyes of other folks.' If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favorite saying was: 'The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.

No shit, there's worse ways to be dead than dying.

Someday you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me.

So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn't funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it. That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can't control life, at least you can control your version.

We see what we want. We see how we want. We only see ourselves.

When people think you're dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just waiting for their turn to speak

I could imagine myself becoming one of Marla's stories.

Human beings don't cultivate ideas. On the contrary…Ideas cultivate us.

No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement while somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake

Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar Nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven't already done...

Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now? she says.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.

Rant said that view of time was set up so folks won't live forever. It's the planned obsolescence we've all agreed to...'Nothing says you have to swallow this,' Rant told me. 'You can always just die.

What you don't understand, you can make mean anything.

Rant goes, Really, truly with her whole entire heart, does Echo hate somebody? I go, doesn't Rant mean love? And Rant shrugs and says, Ain't it the same thing?

You're a different human being to everybody you meet.

The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.

When you understand, Brandy says, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan, Brandy says, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.