Quotes About Perspective

Everything that is said is said by an observer.

That is a pity; they must have known about whole worlds that we cannot touch.

What had been right in 1431 in English Rouen – to secure the girl's salvation by persuading her to abjure her heresy and embrace the loving counsel of the Church – was wrong twenty-five years later, in a kingdom from which God had driven the English with their tails between their legs.

He only tells the story once but you see it from about 8 points of view, you have to pay attention the whole time to see whether something seems to be true or is just what somebody says is true.

Reflected, framed, the room had charms foreign to the original, just as an ordinary or even ugly object gains beauty and dignity when painted or photographed.

Once he had a foot in the door he explained, "It's not for me to make moral judgments. I'm a businessman. I deal with people as they are, not as they ought to be." "Speaking

Go back to your house then, and see what happiness you find there.' 'It has nothing to do with happiness.' 'It is true that marriage seems often to have little to do with happiness. But who am I to judge? I have never been married.

she would have to tell the story of this afternoon to herself over and over until she could make a different shape from it to comfort herself.

It does not matter what happens now. There is no world: it has fallen away from us.

We are creatures of story.

It must be quite hard when you're a parent and you find out that your children's dreams are nothing like the dreams you've had for them.

Write what I know, who wants to read that? If only our apartment was haunted or I was the tiniest bit possessed by the devil.

I scroll through iPhone photos and see that if I delete pictures of myself with a double chin, I will erase all proof of my glorious life.

All my life, I'd thought of having kids with the seriousness that I'd thought of taking a ceramics class. When I finally took one and came home with three beautifully glazed but warped bowls, my husband said: "You're not going to turn into a lady who makes pots, are you?" I was not. I kept the bowls and display them proudly—one holds fruit, one batteries, one loose change—but I had no interest in making anything else.

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life."

My dad wrote to me. My mum put him up to it because she got this great idea that hearing from someone I'd never met and who didn't give a fuck about me might cheer me up...

What about your past? How often would you travel there, given the chance? Often? Never? And when you got there, would you think about staying forever?

I think there's more to God than the big beardy feller in the sky. I know that God is on earth, in people, in good deeds. God is in the big things, and the small things. He's under the fingernails of our daughters, and he's in all the kindnesses we show people. I know that what people call 'God's work' can be called 'lightening the burden' for another human being. My kind of God might be a bit different from yours, maybe that's all.

History is a card table full of illusions, and we must sort through and pick the ones we wish to believe.

The truth lies somewhere between the reasons and the stories.

I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.

How on earth could he not see it? It stood on the wooden floor behind him, in the corner just inside the door, where the light from the hallway poorly fell: an old-fashioned alarm clock with three blunt stumps for legs and a bell like a Prussian helmet. Its face, a faithful little moon, was turned up to her, its hands were spread to plead innocence, and its inner mechanism emitted without ceasing the rapid ribbon of blows called the passing of time.

Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: 'So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.

I had been working there for several months [in New York], in that climate of intellectual openness which is so astonishing to an Australian...