Quotes About Perspective

These are the incongruities of memory. It is hard to hold on to the entirety of something, but pieces may be held up to light.

the truth can be both horrible and lovely at the same time.

Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.

My mother, as a woman in her sixties, is mostly a mystery to me. In my mind, she's an eternal forty-two, and as her daughter, I never get past seventeen. There

Strange, now, how after so many years my mother's model is starting to recede. Before I became a mother, I was a motherless daughter, and "motherless" always overshadowed "daughter" in that phrase. Now I'm a motherless mother, and "mother" is the word that carries most of the weight. Early loss influences me, daily, but it doesn't define me anymore.

We've been lucky," he said, rising from his chair with his palm pressed against his forehead as he heard the ambulance attendants on the front path outside. "We had her four months longer than she was expected to live." Lucky? I thought, as I stood behind an emergency room curtain an hour later, holding my mother's hand and trying to press ice chips between her cracked and bloodstained lips. Could someone identify the lucky people here?

I know you feel too big for this place. But when you get out of here, you'll see how small you are in the world.

there is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy. Endymion Leer

Besides, there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And, even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave them to wither on the ground. He

When, on his return to Lud-in-the-Mist, he had been twitted for having wasted so much time on such an unworthy object, he had answered that a pig was thrall to the same master as a Mayor, and that it needed as much skill to cure the one as the other; adding that a good fiddler enjoys fiddling for its own sake, and that it is all the same to him whether he plays at a yokel's wedding or a merchant's funeral.

Have you ever noticed a little child of three or four walking hand in hand with its father through the streets? It is almost as if the two were walking in time to perfectly different tunes. Indeed, though they hold each other's hand, they might be walking on different planets … each seeing and hearing entirely different things.

anyone,then, who has tasted fairy fruit walks through life beside other people to a different tune from theirs

there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And, even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave them to wither on the ground.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

Mingle a little folly with your wisdom; a little nonsense now and then is pleasant.

Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.

A pauper in the midst of wealth.

Remember you must die whether you sit about moping all day long or whether on feast days you stretch out in a green field, happy with a bottle of Falernian from your innermost cellar.

How comes it, Maecenas, that no man living is content with the lot that either his choice has given him, or chance has thrown in his way, but each has praise for those who follow other paths?

I would not have borne this in my hot youth when Plancus was consul.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.

Alexander at the head of the world never tasted the true pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school.

Mr. [Thomas] Gray the poet has often observed to me that if a man were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself it must in whatever hands prove a most useful and entertaining one.