Quotes About Perspective

The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's.

It's that moment about two months in, when you think you've finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It's a delusion – you've only been there eight weeks – and it's followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

The story you think you know is never the real one.

I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.

It was so awful and weird. I could see all the things I had loved about him, I could see them, but I didn't love them anymore.

Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision.

I was raised on science as other people are raised on God, or Gods, or the crocodile.

My mind has circled back again to that conversation with Helen on the steps of Schermerhorn about how each culture has a flavor. What she said that night comes back to me at least once a day. Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years?

We're always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity.

Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.

You don't struggle with these questions?" "No. But I've always thought my opinion was the right one. It's a small flaw I have." "An American flaw.

But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She

What's the point of anyone's search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.

It's not here anymore," he said. "What?" "What happened." "Then where is it?" "It's gone. It's over. You can't find it, stroke it, coo over it. Time has stolen it away like it fucking steals everything. In rare instances, like yours, that can be a good thing.

This was the way it was with Marc. His heart had a narrow field of vision. I knew it held a great many things, but the aperture was small and I had to wait my turn to be rotated back around into the light where I would glow so brightly I'd be all he could see.

For so long I'd felt that what I'd been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating

But don't you think there are larger issues the author is trying to explore?' 'Yes, but they shouldn't be given primacy over or even separated from the experience of the story itself.

You don't always see how much other people are shaping you.

It's strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I'm thirty-one now, and my mother is dead. (4)

My voice is nothing special, but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you've coaxed it out of her, it's hard not to always believe it.

I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say.

We always sound confident when we're talking about the other person's book.

She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. 'We're always, in everything we do in this world,' she said, 'limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl.