Quotes About Perspective

I prefer to rely on my memory. I have lived with that memory a long time, I am used to it, and if I have rearranged or distorted anything, surely that was done for my own benefit.

I want to look at the work. I don't care if its white or black. I don't agree that "If you're white, you can't write". I want to see what they can do. I also don't believe that because I am a man, I can't write about women. I had better quit writing, if I can't write about women. Why can't women write about men? It's talent that's important.

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.

While Heisenberg had described the tusks and Schrodinger the trunk, the total elephant is so much more than its parts.

You aren't a true husband/man until you've done the work of a wife/women

A wall of books is a wall of windows.

I'm a positive person, and I try to look at the good side of everything.

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.

Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you're not and that's what you always reach for in a song.

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't.

I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.

I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.

F. once said: At sixteen I stopped fucking faces. I had occasioned the remark by expressing disgust at his latest conquest, a young hunchback he had met while touring an orphanage. F. spoke to me that day as if I were truly one of the underprivileged; or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all when he muttered: Who am I to refuse the universe?

Going nowhere … isn't about turning your back on the world; it's about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

To discover the truth in anything that is alien, first dispense with the indispensable in your own vision.

We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.

To a Young Nun This undemanding love that our staggered births have purchased for us — You in your generation, I in mine. I am not the one you are looking for. You are not the one I've stopped looking for. How sweetly time disposes of us as we go arm in arm over the Bridge of Details: Your turn to chop. My turn to cook. Your turn to die for love. My turn to resurrect.

only one thing made him happy and now that it was gone everything made him happy

The cripple here that you clothe and feed Is neither starved nor cold; He does not ask for your company, Not at the centre, the centre of the world.

After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, "Lies - damned lies - and statistics," still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of.

To St. Paul, stripes, stones, shipwrecks, and thorns in the flesh were religious experiences to Judas Iscariot, the daily companionship of Jesus of Nazareth was not.

A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all — he's walking on them.

As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.