Quotes About Perspective

You know what you meant. I only know what you said.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

You shouldn't believe in ghosts,' he says uncertainly. 'I don't,' Martian says. 'But who are they to care, if I believe in them or not?

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.

The past changes a little every time we retell it.

Beneath every history, another history.

He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.

He wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.

That's what we want, he thinks: help in prosperity. . . We never know how to take it when our life begins to be charmed.

You are only young once, they say, but doesn't go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs.

Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read, and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

He would have explained, if he'd known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, "I found an easier way to be.

History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past

So often in council he has taken Katherine's part, as if he were one of her appointed lawyers. 'You make this argument, my lords,' he has said, 'but the dowager princess will allege…' And 'Katherine will refute you, thus.' Not because he favours her cause but because it saves time; as her opponent, he enters into her concerns, he judges her stratagems, he reaches every point before she does. It

So, Lucile thinks, Gabrielle has the prospect of escape; but in her apartment at the rue des Cordeliers, she sits still and silent, in the conscious postures of pregnant women. Sometimes she cries; this chit Louise Gély trips down the stairs to join her in a few sniffles. Gabrielle is crying for her marriage, her soul and her king; Louise is crying, she supposes, for a broken doll or a kitten run over in the street. Can't stand it, she thinks. Men are better company.

If what someone wants from you is an admission, it is never in your interest to give it.

How close we hug our enemies! They are our familiars, our other selves.

Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

occurs to him that when he is dead, other people will be getting on with their day;

And yet … he feels something, in his heart, and then he sits down and works out the logic of it, in his head. Then he says that the head part came first; and we believe him.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.