Quotes About Perspective

Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.

Niemand hat je gesagt, dass das Universum normal ist.

Reading had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape ... writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately ... but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.

You might already be able to tell that I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I offer no apologies.

What do you think of the war, M. Severn? [...] What can one think of war? I said, tasting the wine again. It was quite good, though nothing in the Web could match my memories of French Bordeaux. War does not call for judgment, I said, merely survival.

For some reason it's as difficult, perhaps more difficult, this time. Dying should become easier with practice.

I've learned enough this year to know that life may surprise you, but not usually in the ways you imagine.

One day things can be going along like they always were and then, suddenly, in a simple rotation of an overheated planet, everything can change.

Precision about language can be really, really annoying. It can make you miss the point of what the other person is saying altogether.

It was then, there in the darkness, with only those little pin-points of light to see by, light from a world away where other people with their own problems and their own secrets lived their own lives, that everything in our world changed for good.

After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: You can say, This is impossible, terrible.' Or you can say, 'This is beautiful, wonderful.' You can imagine that you're in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.

Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace.

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.

If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

My newfound awareness was both gauntlet and gift. The choice wasn't to see it as one or the other. It was to embrace both.

What if I had always known that the reason I looked different and felt different was in fact because I was different? It would be easy to fantasize that this would have been better. But we can never know what lies at the heart of the path not taken.

My life is a museum," says my ninety-one-year-old aunt. "I can walk through any of the galleries at any time.

He's been reading James Gleick, and repeats a passage to Ben by heart. "If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

Reading is an exercise in empathy. To read is to enter another world in a way different from any other art form.

And it was so important to realize that I didn't know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn't have all the information.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

It is a measure of true adulthood that we are able to imagine our parents as the people they may have been before us.

They aren't there for posterity. Nor for reference. I don't believe the young woman who wrote them has anything to teach me. What does she know? She hasn't lived my life.

Singin' In the Rain might get you through an anxious week or two, but it won't get you through an anxious life. For that you need either a brain transplant (the only procedure of its kind, it has been said, in which it is better to be a donor than a recipient), a fully stocked bomb shelter, or a thorough adjustment of your perspective on existential risk and reward.