Quotes About Perspective

Look, I don't mean to be rude, but you could never have a normal life, even if that's what you thought you wanted. You and me, we're not 'normal.

I wonder, not for the first time, if shame and pride are merely two sides of the same coin.

The first twenty-three years of my life are the ones that shaped me, and the fact

I wonder, not for the first time, if shame and pride are merely two sides of the same coin. In a

She says she can't believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let the world come to her.

This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting

People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn't. Not really. He wasn't even in the field; he conjured it from a room in the house, an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings. The scale of the barn is wrong. And I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It's not my body, really, and maybe not even my head. He

I know all too well how it is when the beautiful visions you've been fed don't match up with reality.

And this is where we belong." "No, it isn't. It's just where we ended up.

Regret?" Vivian raises her shoulders in a shrug. "I'm not sure what good it is to regret.

Si no puedes reírte de ti misma, vas a tener una vida muy complicada.

Unwrapping the leftover currant bread at the Grotes' that evening, I tell them about my party. Mr. Grote snorts. "How ridiculous, celebrating a birth date. I don't even know the day I was born, and I sure can't remember any of theirs," he says, swinging his hand toward his kids. "But let's have that cake.

Sometimes you don't look for perfect. Sometimes enough is the most you can hope for.

Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she's come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.

Maybe all of us could live several lives, giving some things up and gaining others, assembling different versions of contentment.

The questions on the assignment sheet are: What did you choose to bring with you to the next place? What did you leave behind? What insights did you gain about what's important? Molly's kind of into the idea of the project, but she doesn't want to interview Ralph or—God forbid—Dina.

I don't think I've missed much." "Wireless Internet, digital photographs, smartphones, Facebook, YouTube . . ." Molly taps the fingers of one hand. "The entire world has changed in the past decade." "Not my world." "But you're missing out on so much." Vivian laughs. "I hardly think FaceTube—whatever that is—would improve my quality of life.

I do care about real life. It's just not as interesting as what's in my books.

Great minds think alike-especially when they are female.

There is an old Chinese saying, "Write your sorrows in sand and etch your joys in stone.

perpetually positioning our "self" in relationship to other "selves"—

A man is ever apt to contemplate himself out of all proportion to his surroundings.

Perhaps in the pursuit of happiness, men and women take somewhat different paths. And, isn't it more than a little patronizing to suggest that most....women are not free? They're not self-determining human beings?

To play someone who is who they are because of the happiness and contentedness that they've known in their life is interesting because of sort of how banal it is.