Quotes About Perspective

Faulkner didn't put those

wrong side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

to be in the middle distance, and he was not perceptibly

George Bernard Shaw which Annabel quoted so often: "Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.

that often the onlooker suffers even more than the participant.

an apple is an apple whoever bites it.

You should read more Oscar Wilde," said Charlie, "and less Maynard Keynes.

But I have discovered with advancing years that few things are entirely black or white, but more often different shades of grey... They are both oaks, even if they were planted in different forests. But then, m'lord, we all suffer in our different ways from being prisoners of birth.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...

The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.

But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.

My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older. Why's that? the girl asked. It's proportional, Leonard explained. When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.

The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions. They were the key to your unhappiness. They were the evidence that life wasn't fair. If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.

Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table, presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts... But that didn't happen with Julie. This was because Julie isn't husband-hunting. So she didn't have to interview me for the job.

If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, Baksheesh! Baksheesh! Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand. Mike said, I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it's hopeless. It never stops. Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you, Mitchell said. Yeah, well, Mike said, obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta.

Up until recently, Milton thought of Tessie as his prim cousin. Whenever one of his friends expressed interest in her, Milton told them to give up the idea. That's honey from the icebox, he said, As Artie Shaw might have. Cold sweets don't spread.