Quotes About Perspective

you interpret daily life according to your ideas of what is possible or not possible.

It is not that physical reality is false. It is that the physical picture is simply one of an infinite number of ways of perceiving the various guises through which consciousness expresses itself.

Your thoughts and beliefs form your reality.

it is important that you understand the different ways of relating to reality, and how those ways create the experienced events. You

If you dwell upon limitations, you will meet them.

She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author's intention or achievement.

Frances was, by nature, an organizer. She wanted to believe that happiness could be arranged. Well, perhaps it could.

She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author's intention or achievement.

contemplate the difference between a reason and an excuse. A reason is its own reward, but an excuse leads to disappointment every time.

I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life defeating my efforts to gain some perspective.

Don't you want to know what happened?" Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, "No, I don't, because I don't want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you're gonna want to tell it, so don't bother.

hurricane down in Florida somewhere. Who in Iowa thought about Florida? People in Iowa had problems of their own—maybe not dust storms like the ones out in Nebraska and Oklahoma

It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.

am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later.

Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she'd ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn't very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her).

We watched the swimmers and sunbathers and I thought about this. Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts you were allowed to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who've really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind.

not unlike a bomb blast, two years after that, where was he, northern France, if you called Cambrai France (some people didn't, they called it "Kamerijk

We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them.

But he was sixty-two when I was, born, and the novelty of daughters had worn away long before.

She was almost sixty and she had not been to London, or Paris, or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced, as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. But, she saw, she was balanced on a very narrow perch.

Old Eileen leaned forward in her chair, thrusting her face closer to the child who had been gradually approaching her. Where is the centre of the world? she abruptly demanded. Esther stood silently in front of her, holding onto a book she had forgotten to put on a table. She did not know the answer to the riddle. The place where you stand, Old Eileen said. The place where you stand is the centre of the world.

Reality is just a collective hunch.

The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.