Quotes About Perspective

Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.

C'è chi pensa che l'amore sia la fine della strada, e che se si è abbastanza fortunati da trovarlo ci si ferma lì. Altri dicono che è come un burrone nel quale si precipita. Ma chiunque abbia vissuto almeno un po' sa che muta con il passare dei giorni, e secondo l'energia che gli si dedica, lo si conserva o ci si aggrappa, oppure lo si perde, ma a volte capita che non sia nemmeno mai stato lì, sin dall'inizio.( Questo bacio vada al mondo intero)

What was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves if incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other.

But being rational about it didn't cure it.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

It's hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light. The problem is that the images that so often return to me are seldom those I want.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

An optimist is a braver cynic.

Rami, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there." We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it's crazy.

If your life doesn't flash in front of your eyes, old boy, does that mean you've had no life at all?

Sometimes you've got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.

For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

it is not true that we have only one life to live. If we dwell in literature we can have as many lives as we want.

At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own.

Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there.

So many times people would come up to him after his lectures and say that they wished there were more like him. What do you mean? he would ask. Immediately they would realize what they had said and drop their heads. As if he didn't encounter people like himself every single day, at every single angle. As if he were the only sort of Palestinian they could stomach.

It's nonviolence that is hard to deal with, whether coming from Israelis or Palestinians or both. It's confusing to them.

People can look different from hour to hour depending on the angle of daylight.

You have to look on the world with a shine like no one else has.

The truth of the matter is that the light at the end of the tunnel generally belongs to the pharmaceutical companies.

So, leave the cynics be. Out-cynic them. Step into that elsewhere. Believe that your story is bigger than yourself. In

Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.

A bi gezunt, his mother would have said. She was always one for the ancient phrase. You have your health, what more do you want? —