Quotes About Perspective

What importance should be given to details, in developing a subject?-- Remorselessly sacrifice everything that does not contribute to clarity, verisimilitude, and effect. Accentuate everything that sets the main idea in relief, so that the impression be colourful, picturesque. It's sufficient that the rest be in its proper place, but in half-tone. That is what gives to style, as to painting, unity, perspective, and effect. - Constantin Georges Romain Héger, teacher to Charlotte Brontë

Katherine Mansfield, clearly speaking personally, had remarked wryly in 1924 that "the true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone—reading between the lines—has become the secret friend of their author,"54

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Lili's world was not so different from my dioramas, or even from Sirena's installations: you took a tiny portion of the earth and made it yours, but really what you wanted was for someone else -- ideally, a grown-up, because a grown-up matters, has authority, but is also not the same as you -- to come and see, to get it, and thereby, somehow, to get you; and all of this, surely so that you might ultimately feel less alone on the planet.

Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?)

It's a different story depending on where you start: who's good, who's bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren't anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward.

You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.

Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality. Have you ever asked yourself whether you'd rather fly or be invisible?

I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.

Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are.

and of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing.

Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world's apparent inability to see the light. He would have to show them.

I'm forty-two years old—which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.

It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you'll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city. Or

If you told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. That's always the way.

All those years we'd been friends, since forever, we'd used the same words and perhaps meant different things--sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we'd never known it.

Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she'd outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn't want to be reminded that it was fake.

I measure my life out in books. You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?

Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren't really feeling what you're feeling, it doesn't make the feeling go away.

I don't believe something's important simply because I'm told it's important; and the inverse, perhaps more crucially, is also true: something isn't unimportant simply because it's been largely overlooked by others.

It was like splashing in a blowup baby pool in the backyard, when you'd become used to swimming in the ocean. How

Even though this world is narrow, it is wide... to those who understand. This world isn't the only one.

This isn't Tokyo.

One night, on the phone with him, in the car on the way back from the grocery store, I broke down crying and said, "I'm a terrible wife. I'm not a good person. I'm as bad as everyone says." He said, "Don't flatter yourself. You're no better and no worse than anyone else.

Forks are absurd, he scoffed. They insult your food. They make it think you're killing it twice.