Quotes About Perspective

If there are people at once rich and content, be assured that they are content because they know how to be so, not because they are rich

When I loved you and you loved me, You were the sky, the sea, the tree; Now the skies are skies, and seas are seas, And trees are brown and they are trees.

I once interviewed Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics and a noted baseball enthusiast. I asked if it bothered him that he received less money for winning the Nobel Prize than Roger Clemens, who was pitching for the Red Sox at the time, earned in a single season. "No," Solow said. "There are a lot of good economists, but there is only one Roger Clemens." That is how economists think.

There are tales that can give you yourself completely and the world could never treat you so badly then that you wouldn't neglect it. One can get everything by listening or looking in the right way: there are all sorts of turns.

And jewels and words are no less and no more necessary than cotton and silence.

don't believe in these things. There's London and us and the things we know.

No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly.

She endured her own nature and supposed it to be the burden of another's.

So long always as joy was not rashly pinned to the happening; so long as you accepted what joys the universe offered and did not seek to compel the universe to offer you joys of your own definition.

When what you write about is what you see, what do you write about when it's dark? from "32

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.

Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other.

You forget that your life is a short window, that you are stuck in the present, forget how your life is still here, waiting for you, wondering where you are, going on without you. You forget that people know who you are, think about you, might even be happy to see you

But the experience of Asians in America isn't just a scaled-back or dialed-down version of the Black experience. Instead of co-opting someone else's experience or consciousness, he must define his own.

This gap, always there. Somehow unbridgeable, whether it's across a wide Pacific gulf of language and culture, or just a simple sentence, father to son, always distance.

Chronological living is a kind of lie. That's why I don't do it anymore. Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary.

The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle.

Frustration boils into indignation which condenses into something like, how funny is this shit? Because at some point, this shit kinda is funny.

When I am looking through the viewfinder and I have the Frame of Reference filter set just right, I can, if I choose to, relax my mind in such a way as to imagine that I have actually become one with the device, have merged with it, and after a while the distinction between my vehicle and me gets a bit confused. I

There's just something about Asians that makes reality a little too real, overcomplicates the clarity, the duality, the clean elegance of BLACK and WHITE, the proven template and so the decision is made not in some overarching conspiracy to exclude Asians but because it's just easier to keep it how we have it.

By putting ourselves below everyone, we're building in a self-defense mechanism. Protecting against real engagement. By imagining that no one wants us, that all others are so different from us, we're privileging our own point of view.

Will? What are you doing?" "Being in love with you." "No, you're not. You're falling in love." "Same thing." "Not the same thing," she says. "Falling in love is a story." She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.

Am I the suspect? Or the victim?