Quotes About Perspective

The point is not at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object any more than a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the lord of every story will be I.

Eyewitness News' is a clever plot to convince us that all the important events are happening somewhere else, to other people, at the same time we're literally dying in our beds.

I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining having never been born yourself.

They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required.

Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal.

If you've helped someone die, there is nothing I can tell you. If you haven't, I don't want to tell you. But I must, or what came later may make no sense.

people, including types that I didn't like much at all but felt I had something to learn or to gain from.

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds though which they have filtered it.

Since position and contact play so big a part in determining what can be seen, heard, read, and experienced, as well as what it is permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral judgment is so much more common than constructive thought.

The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

Almost no two experiences are exactly alike, not even of two children in the same household. The older son never does have the experience of being the younger. And therefore, until we are able to discount the difference in nurture, we must withhold judgment about differences of nature. As well as judge the productivity of two soils by comparing their yield before you know which is in Labrador and which in Iowa, whether they have been cultivated and enriched, exhausted, or allowed to run wild.

To the British, Dunkirk symbolizes a generosity of spirit, a willingness to sacrifice for the common good. To Americans, it has come to mean Mrs. Miniver, little ships, The Snow Goose, escape by sea. To the French, it suggests bitter defeat; to the Germans, opportunity forever lost.

People are so afraid of dying that they don't even live the little bit of life they have.

I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars.

It's hard for a man to understand a woman because a man just desires her; but women, most of them anyway, desire desire.

He made me question what was, when for a whole lifetime up till that moment, I accepted the world's excuses.

Sure can. But you know a white man got to go through sumpin' 'fore he could call a black man friend. White man got to see the shit an' smell it too before he could really know a black friend." Jean-Paul

What if' is fo' chirrens, Easy. You's a man.

What's that got to do with a few gray hairs?" Angelo wanted to know. "Girl see one or two and she thinks maybe the man done aged enough to calm down, make somethin' outta himself. She willin' to let him look so maybe she could see what his prospects are like. That way a man like me might get a great night or a lifetime of pot roasts, fat babies, and halfhearted regrets.

There are ten thousand perfectly good reasons not to have children but hearing the love in Feather's voice trumped every one.

I seen it all," old Coydog used to say, "but that don't mean I seen everything.

You could see New Jersey out of Mardi's window. From the seventy-second floor it looked like a scale model of Purgatory.

My experience has been that at its best, news reporting is an approximation of the slant on the truth that reporters, editors, and advertisers want the public to know.