Quotes About Perspective

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. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

Sempre pensamos que aquilo de que precisamos para transformar tudo — o milagre — está em outro lugar, mas muitas vezes está ali, bem ao nosso lado. Algumas vezes, o milagre somos nós mesmos.

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

None of us lives without loss. Or regret. But none of us need live without imagination. We can learn to see past ourselves.

But happiness is not a potato.

Writers always put themselves into their work. But you can't just untangle it and take it back to its source.

Hay quien se cría en una colina y quien se cría en el valle. La mayoria lo hace en el llano. Yo vine a la vida inclinada, y así es como he vivido desde entonces.

This has been my difficulty. The difficulty with my life. Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips. The sensible strong ordinary world of fixity is folklore. The earth is not flat. Geometry cedes to algebra. The Greeks were wrong.

yet when she first left me i thought i had blood poisoning ,i couldn't forget her,now she seemed to have forgotten everything .it made me want to shake her ,to pull all my clothes in the middle of the street and yell remember this body time is a great deadener ,people forget, get bored, grow old , go away. she said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking

There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?

Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.

Even if philosophers were in a position to discover truth, who among them would be interested in it? Each knows well that his system is not better founded than the others; but he supports it because it is his.

Puede decirse muy bien que no empecé a vivir hasta que me tuve por muerto.

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

c'est que si chaque homme pouvait lire dans les cœurs de tous les autres, il y aurait plus de gens qui voudraient descendre que de ceux qui voudraient monter.

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.

clearly not all these people who said that God spoke to them heard the same thing. All the fighting nations said God was on their side. How could God be on everyone's side?

What you get is what you get. What you DO with what you get, though...that's more the point, wouldn't you say -Doon's Father

What you get is what you get. What you do with what you get, though . . . that's more the point, wouldn't you say?

Had I ever spent the day in our neighborhood public high school as an invisible woman while my children were still enrolled there, I no doubt would have insisted on home schooling.

You never really know what's going on with your ceiling until you just give up and lie down on your floor.

I hate Erma, I told Mom... You have to show compassion for her... She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them, she said. You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that. Oh yeah? I said. How about Hitler? What was his redeeming quality? Hitler loved dogs, Mom said without hesitation.