Quotes About Perspective

Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I'll live and die in every possible way?

I have other time frames to worry about besides yours!

If I'd said that to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he hemorrhaged

Peer shook his head. "What have I become, already? An endless series of people – all happy for their own private reasons. Linked together by the faintest thread of memory. Why keep them spread out in time? Why go on pretending that there's one 'real' person, enduring through all those arbitrary changes?

Maybe it seems strange to you, all the trouble we're taking to catch a glimpse of what you're going to see in close-up, so soon. It's hard to explain: I don't think it's jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.

Paul counted – and for argument's sake, tried to defend his own perspective, tried to imagine the outside world actually cycling through fragments of time drawn from ten distinct periods.

The truth is whatever you can't escape.

Recalculate. Then show me sunrise again.

Whatever elaborate, and grotesquely counter-intuitive, underpinnings there might be to familiar reality, it stubbornly continues to be familiar. When Rutherford showed that atoms were mostly empty space, did the ground become any less solid? The truth itself changes nothing.

walked a few paces away from her, then turned his whole body towards the south; in this flat desert, it wasn't impractical to triple his axial span. He

There are times when it's worth putting aside the endless myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature in order to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it is

And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that zone was to see clearly what lay on either side.

Whoever first gains the power to impose their own view decides the issue? Isn't that the definition of barbarism?

You needed someone to vent to, and I had enough distance from it that it didn't weigh me down. I could commiserate and walk away.

I shake my head, horrified. "How can you say that? We've stayed free. We've struggled so hard to stay free." She shrugs. "Maybe. Or maybe we've been captured by what you call freedom.

Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round.

All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.

How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?" "That depends." "On what?" "On how I want to feel.

I said, 'The truth is whatever you can get away with.' 'No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape.

I used to think that if you changed from … valuing one thing to valuing another, it was because you'd learnt something new, understood something better. And it's not like that at all. I just value what I'm stuck with. That's it, that's the whole story. People make a virtue out of necessity. They sanctify what they can't escape.

life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.

We judge and punish based on facts, but facts are not truth. Facts are like a buried skeleton uncovered long after death. Truth is fluid. Truth is alive. To know the truth requires understanding, the most difficult human art. It requires seeing all things at once, forward and backward, the way God sees.

Anger always makes you feel good at the time. Makes you feel bigger than yourself makes you feel that everything you do is justified. But it's a trap. Corran

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.