Quotes About Perspective

It was nice of her to want to believe the best about me. People tend to do that with the strangers they're fucking. If she wanted to think that apathy and independence were the same thing, good for her. Maybe she was right.

Two wrongs don't make a right but sometimes they make me laugh. I am a vengeful god.

I'd never actually talked to a deaf person before but I'd been swimming and gotten water stuck in my ears lots of times, felt that underwater silence as I shook my head and watched people's mouths moving without hearing the words, so I knew what it was like for her. I could empathize.

You're never too old to be young.

Whether the challenge is political or personal, effective remedies differ from individual to individual. But solutions always involve altering perspective, replacing tunnel vision with an expanded view that lets in more light and more possibilities—the oxygen upon which hope thrives.

The most crucial prerequisite for any couple's longevity is to have both partners unequivocally accept, as a baseline, that the person they love is insane and has no morals.

If I've learned one thing, it's that the unfortunate thing about life is that everything's mixed. There's no absolute good and there's no absolute evil. There's just a lot of confusion.

Even when I'm not looking for a meaning one springs naturally to my mind. Do you think it is a disease?

No flower is quite like another of the same species. On a single bush one is constantly surprised by the remarkable character shown by each individual rose. But from the house all one sees is a garden, which is all there is to it anyway in the long run.

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all

A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest. - Paraphrased from The Boxer

She said a good day ain't got no rain She said a bad day is when I lie in the bed And I think of things that might have been

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.

The picture says that what we heard and were told in the newspapers, the media, was not the real story. There's enough doubt in the official story, where the stories were absolutely not consistent with what happened. They paint a different picture than the one that was given to the media.

Perjalanan itu bersifat pribadi. Kalaupun aku berjalan bersamamu, perjalananmu bukanlah perjalananku.

I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.

If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.

Death rephrases the life of everyone who's near.

A viagem é muito mais recompensadora quando deixa de ter que ver com a nossa chegada a um destino e se torna indistinguível de vivermos a nossa vida.

as Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, "Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.

Strollers see more, and are more polite, than drivers.

Nothing moves in India without a bribe, and bribes had been demanded of me in China, Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, and Turkey. As I was seated in a cubicle in the immigration office of Ngurah Rai Airport in Denpasar, Bali, a frowning man in a uniform loomed over me and said, "Give me what I want or I put you on the next plane to Kuala Lumpur." (I gave him $120.) I'd had my wits about me in those places.

My idea had been to drive along the border and nip over whenever convenient to the Mexican side. These dozen or so crossings were a revelation to me, putting the whole border debate into perspective, giving it a human face—or rather, many faces.

Sometimes a whispered word, or a single image or glimpse of humanity, can be a powerful motivation for looking deeper into the world.