Quotes About Perspective

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.

I wasn't a cynic; I was a banged-up realist.

what are out stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

The World is a very old place, so you'll never be able to tell a completely original story

The irony, he said,...is that now that I'm this blind man, it's clearer to me now than it's ever been before. What that line? 'Was blind but now I see...

Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.

Once you left Easterly, you saw the world was full of these people: ticket sellers, snack bar clerks. They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routines.

Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep.

why would white dudes want to change things when they held all the cards?

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love, you know?

I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

I don't begrudge the kids their hormones or their illusions of immortality.

The secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes... Instead of... always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

I ask you for the time of day, you tell me how to build a clock!

Life's absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining. Bam! I got into it.

What are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

The truth, as I saw it, was that Daddy wouldn't have left if she hadn't always been Miss Doom and Gloom. "Pretty?" she said. "Really?" "Yeah, pretty ugly." Her lip shook. She reached for her spray. "God, I was only kidding," I said. "Can't you even take a joke?

I think . . . the secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes.

Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place.

Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.

The real war will never get in the books.

have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?