Quotes About Perspective

I understood. I suffered. But whose sake was I suffering for? I kept thinking of Señor Saguaro's question: Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others'?

I'm that way, goofy as it sounds. Sometimes I don't want things to happen-I'm talking about good things, even wonderful things-because once they happen, I can't look forward to them anymore. But there's an upside, too. Once a wonderful thing is over, I'm not all that sad because then I can start thinking about it, reliving and reliving it in the virtual world in my head.

Maniac kept trying, but he still couldn't see it, this color business. He didn't figure he was white any more than the East Enders were black. He looked himself over pretty hard and came up with at least seven different shades and colors right on his own skin, not one of them being what he would call white (except for his eyeballs, which weren't any whiter than the eyeballs of the kids in the East End).

For the life of him, he couldn't figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.

When you're inside your own story, you don't see things like a reader. You don't see your life in tidy paragraphs and chapters.

When you're nothing, you're free to believe anything.

He said he would try, but I guess he never got the chance. About the last thing I remember him saying was "Don't worry so much about it. It's not the sneakers that count, it's the feet.

A Terra dizia: Toma aqui, um presente para você. Mas o que fazemos? Nós a removemos com pás. Nós a golpeamos. Nós a raspamos. Nós a limpamos. Saia do nosso caminho. Nós a colocamos de canto.

Like everyone else, he is the star of his own life.

War became less about machine-gun chatter and spectacular explosions and more about people.

Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.

We did our best to understand the murder: the murderer was a part of our lives; not so the victim.

In this colored world of television, gardening was the white cane of a blind man. By changing the channel he could change himself.

From God's point of view it seemed to make more sense if everyone lost the war, since everyone was committing murder.

Belief is a powerful lens; it can shape the world world to it.

Claude's father was one of those guys who thought if you didn't laugh, it was because you hadn't heard the joke clearly enough.

He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.

Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't--and perhaps loses track of just where she is.

She saw death as just another wedding she wasn't invited to.

You don't really want my side of the story. You don't want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside of my head. You don't want to feel the things I've felt. You just want to know that one thing: why. Fine. Here's why: Her. I did it all for her.

Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one.

People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.