Quotes About Perspective

What do I think about the story? he asked himself. I don't even know if we've got the right version. But no, that's not the point. The right version would presumably be true, and a legend doesn't have to be true, it has other things to do.

When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head - no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine - ours - is the only evidence.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

So now we are young still but a better sort of young.

Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested. I well remember the moment at which I discovered that history was not a matter of received opinion.

When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell - everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth, and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.

Don't you ever realise, said Helen, that the way we live is unlike the way other people live? On the whole I should have thought that was cause for satisfaction.

Rose said: 'Some people would be needing their spare glasses, or that blue cardigan. You need a book. Of course.' 'A deficiency?'said Charlotte meekly. 'Not at all. The need defines you, that's all.

When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy. I'd rather like to go back to fantasising.

There's this piece of contemporary mythology that the forties are the best time of your life. A load of cock, so far as I'm concerned.

Churches have always seemed to me almost irrefutable evidence. They make me wonder if – just possibly – I might be wrong.

One thing old age does is play tricks with time. Time

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule. I

As Helen, Edward and Louise grew up they had come to recognise their mother's outlook for what it was. They realised with discomfort that she was not so much egotistical as fettered – trapped within a perpetual adolescence. She moved for ever within a landscape whose only point of reference was herself.

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.

Gardening has this embracing quality in that it colours the way you look at the world.

I cannot write chronologically of Egypt. Ancient Egypt. So-called ancient Egypt. In my history of the world – this realistic kaleidoscopic history – Egypt will have its proper place as the complacent indestructible force that has perpetuated itself in the form of enough carved stone, painted plaster, papyri, granite, gold leaf, lapis lazulis, bits of pot and fragments of wood to fill the museums of thew world. Egypt is not then but now, conditioning the way we look at things.

You need a certain mentality to cope with children. I don't have it. Thank God.

And in any case, I am someone else now. This seems to contradict earlier assertions that you are in old age the person you always were. What I mean is that old age has different needs, different satisfactions, a different outlook. I remember my young self, and I am not essentially changed, but I perform otherwise today. There are things I no longer want, things I no longer do, things that are now important.

I'm afraid I can't do the things you want me to do because people don't go in much for sorcery nowadays. I don't think they'd be very interested.

Still, if that's the way she feels about it there's not much use you going home now and saying "Look mum, I got a bloke coming in tomorrow to see about the ghost", is there?

What we have read makes us what we are – quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

The problem about us,' said Helen, 'is that we've never felt the same way about money as most other people seem to.' 'I've never thought of it as a problem.