Quotes About Perspective

So that's why I'm such a big fan of storytelling. I think the most important thing is empathy. And it's less about 'those people'. Because I think we're all 'those people'.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.

Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.

I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.

I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.

Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?

People say the magic has gone out of the moon now that someone's stood on it. I don't think so. It would take more than a man's foot to steal the moon.

What sex are you?" Doesn't matter does it? After all that's your problem." If I keep you, what will happen?" You'll have a difficult, different time." Is it worth it?" That's up to you.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything--the miracle--is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.' 'And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.

I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I.