Quotes About Perspective

Don't live with writers. Writers are bastards.

I partnered you with Jim all those years ago because you were complimentary kinds of crazy. You kept each other in check. I need you to not crawl back inside your own skull and watch the world with binoculars from deep cover.

Of course I don't care if you're bleeding! I'm fucking autistic !

From his vantage, three steps back and to the right, Tallow could see Rosato's eye a good five inches outside Rosato's head and still attached to his eye socket by a mess of red worms. In that single second, Tallow abstractedly realized that in his last moment of life, James Rosato could see his killer from two different angles.

In the long run, you see, none of that matters. I've seen Heaven, Dowling. And it's not a place where you exercise any power. In the long run, we are all three-dimensional side-effects of a two-dimensional universe existing in a multidimensional stack.

Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.

Time was this place didn't make sense and I could live with it. Either it's changed, or I have.

There are many good reasons for drinking, and one's just entered my head: If you don't drink when you're living, how the fuck can you drink when you're dead?

There would be internet, and books, and music. He could think, and be, and hold the world at a distance in order to see it properly.

You wanted a more interesting world… Maybe I'm growing up quickly. Maybe I'm better than you planned… Maybe I'm just showing you that your world was interesting enough all the time, all on its own. And now I'm punishing you.

It is in the interests of both sexes to hear the other sex's experience of powerlessness.

Children living with their dad felt positively about their mom; children living with their mom were more likely to think negatively of their dad.

if you can afford college, there's no need to go.

Don't take life seriously because you can't come out of it alive.

We do not see that prayer is the asking of God to fulfill His needs.

If you are going to be calm in the midst of chaos, there's something you must stop doing. When life gets difficult, when it feels as though you are being squeezed by the pressures all around you, you must refuse to panic. Jesus was not telling His disciples they were not

What God calls evil can slowly begin to appear normal-even good.

A literary work ... is, during the time one reads it, a friend with whom one has chosen to spend one's time. The question now is, what does this friendship do to my mind? What does this new friend ask me to notice, to desire, to care about? How does he or she invite me to view my fellow human beings?

We may exhort ourselves to read tolerantly, we may quote Coleridge on the willing suspension of disbelief until we think ourselves totally suspended in a relativistic universe, and still we will find many books which postulate readers we refuse to become, books that depend on 'beliefs' or 'attitudes'...which we cannot adopt even hypothetically as our own.

the author's judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it. Whether its particular forms are harmful or serviceable is always a complex question, a question that cannot be settled by any easy reference to abstract rules. As we begin now to deal with this question, we must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear.

if we focus on what's ugly, we attract more ugliness into our thoughts, and then into our emotions, and ultimately into our lives

Never underestimate your power to change yourself; never overestimate your power to change others.

Not only do you become what you think about, but the world also becomes what you think about. Those who think that the world is a dark place are blind to the light that might illuminate their lives. Those who see the light of the world view the dark spots as merely potential light.

What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds.