Quotes About Perspective

Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she forgets.

or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth.

Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over...

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.

The shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit.

Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house.

The shit is not the shit, the pigeon is the shit.

Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean." "Another

the feeling I had of moving into somebody else's broken ambition.

To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

I couldn't afford to be offended.

I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

What do you want to do Marvin? croaked Alex, and then coughed the frog out. Excuse me? Apart from being a milk operative. I mean, what do you want to do with you life? Marvin eloquently groaned, like a disappointed academic, and slapped his own forehead. I tell you something, yeah? Das an idiot's question, yeah? Life is going to do things to me. And that's all there is. And it's all good. Yogurts?

Time is not what it is but how it is felt...

The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.

We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way?

He'd turned to me, red-faced, and asked: 'If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?

fiction can't be written to comply with winning arguments.

Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

You don't know you're born. You don't. You don't know you're born

The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world-in its dramatic as well as its quiet times- we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming. Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?