Quotes About Perspective

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

A person who wields power cannot see truth; that is the privilege of the powerless.

It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumerable "lives of Jesus" were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus.

postmodernists' replacement of eternal truths with a story. But there is a profound difference between the two. For the postmodernists, there are many stories, but no overarching truth by which they can be assessed. They are simply stories. The church's affirmation is that the story it tells, embodies, and enacts is the true story and that others are to be evaluated by reference to it.

The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about "what is true for me" is an evasion of the serious business of living.

I accept now with equanimity the question so constantly addressed to me, 'Are you an American' and merely return the accurate answer, 'Yes, I am a Canadian.'

I was then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues).

A man above thirty cannot enter into the wild visions of an enthusiastic girl.

Each was changed in himself, and yet each thought the other only changed, himself the same.

Hope and experience take two different sides of an argument.

Modern history might be told by a succession of dinners.

There are in existence two periods when we shrink from any great vicissitude—early youth and old age. In the middle of life, we are indifferent to change ; for we have discovered that nothing is, in the end, so good or so bad as it at first appeared.

I may not be smart enough to debate you point-for-point on this, but I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap.

I saw a robin redbreast in Central Park today, but it turned out to be a sparrow with an exit wound.

They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a native American, that number is more like 300 million.

This is one of the dangers of sorrow: that in our grief for those who are gone we lose our interest in those who are living, and slacken our zeal in the work which is allotted to us.

We can never see the sunrise by looking toward the west. Japanese proverb

The disappointments of life are simply the hidden appointments of love. C. A. Fox

I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.

I'm aware that a film is different than a play, and that a film isn't going to be the filmed record of the play. It's its own separate entity, and I've come to peace with that.

Sometimes my family thinks I've made my childhood a bit more Dickensian than it was, and it probably wasn't all that bad. But I was uncomfortable as a kid.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.