Quotes About Perspective

The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men.

If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.' He slapped the wall of the boxcar as a signal. The train lurched forward.

of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the

It was in the realm of his humor, and Carney had doubtless laughed. You get older and the old jokes grow less funny.

it trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from perceived persecution, the this-is-actually-happening from the mere paranoid manifestation

If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.

Is this the truth of our historic encounter?

No one really cares about other people when you get down to it—their own struggles are too close up.

Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing

According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

Raymond shared theirs—and the

There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth, and it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all.

Now he thought about the poor man and his last view of earth: the groove of rust worn from the tub's leaky faucet, like the ooze from a wound.

Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.

It's not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it's the same.

Lesson: If you're going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.

It was the last time he raised his hand. The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

You can argue for hours about the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but the dark wins every time so fuck the Beatles, just fuck 'em, perspective-wise.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it's still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

There is always room for at least two truths.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.