Quotes About Perspective

Reasoning that I would rather take a detour for hours on a bad road than sit in my car in a traffic jam, I thanked him and drove away, past the parked cars and the children and the protesting teachers, through the bowl of a green valley and into the hills that looked rockier and drier in the distance.

every trip is unique.

Tourists don't know where they've been. Travelers don't know where they're going.

Why is it . . . that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?

It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.

The next time you clap on your expensive Bose headphones or fire up your car stereo, you had to consider that they were put together a hundred yards from Arizona by someone living in a hut in the Sonoran Desert

When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.

he was turning sixty-two, not an age of life-altering shocks but only of subtle diminishments.

Tourists don't know where they've been and Travelers don't know where they are going.

Just curiosity," I said. When he made a disapproving squint, I added, "Don't you go over now and then?" "Never been there," he said. "It's ten feet away!" "I'm staying here," he said, his squint now suggesting that I should be doing the same.

Nothing is stranger than being in a fairly bad place and being told that another place-your destination-is a great deal worse.

I argued myself into thinking that physical experience is the only reality. I didn't want to be told about this at second hand. I didn't want to look at picture or study it on a small computer screen. I didn't want to be lectured about it. I wanted to be traveling in the middle of it, and for it to be washing over me, as it was today.

I asked them to amplify a bit.

If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life—the homebound writer's irritants. Being kept waiting is the human condition.

Fiction give life to places in expressive ways that no history book can begin to suggest.

There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars.

Since there was no longer a horizon towards which to rush, they would invent fake ones - substitute horizons.

Prayer at once embraces our world and yet constantly measures and weighs it.

People – Americans, mostly – realise how attached they are to material comforts when they arrive in India.

A child's parents should be able to forbid their son or daughter from reading a book of mine or anyone else's. However, those same parents should have zero control over what everyone else's kids can read.

The one big difference between John and me, besides the fact that he's a boy and I'm a girl, is I have compassion.

Indians think it is important to remember, while Americans believe it is important to forget.

Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.

Who cares for your fashions and your wars and your causes? I will shortly be gone and I have seen many fashions come and go and many causes so passionately defended only to be forgotten.