Quotes About Perspective

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

If the demons lie within they travel with you. Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.

We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in. . . . It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and them without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

But, Mistress, do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

What is 'no'? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the 'yes'.

Stories are always true... it's the facts that mislead.

Why was money worth everything when you had none of it, and nothing when you had too much?

The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

It seems to me that being the right size for your world-- and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions-- is a valuable clue to learning how to live.

My mother has often been labelled as strange but that's because she says things that people can't possibly believe. Mostly she's right.

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.

Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

I can change the story. I am the story.

If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.

You are young, said my father. You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day. You'll get older, said my mother, that's what happens. Then what happens? You won't be able to find the treasure. Will I be too old to look for it? No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open -- the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.