Quotes About Perspective

Hardship finds its way into every life. It's just much easier to see our own than other people's. Hannah

Through all my adult life, I had wanted to know exactly where I was going and what path to take to get there. I had never considered the beauty of where I was.

The secret to a happy life is not in getting what you want. It is in learning to want what you get. Don't waste your time crying over what you're not given. When you have tears in your eyes, you can't see all the beautiful things around you.

Joy, I realized, isn't so much a circumstance you find yourself in but a choice you make.

It's funny how family histories seem to differ, depending on whom you ask.

Ultimately, it's not so much what life deals you as what you choose to own that matters, a spiritually searching law clerk had once said to

How wonderful the days when all was well. How necessary, also, that we must release them now. It is fine enough to glance at the past, but one must never focus there overlong. Don't you think?

always assume people's behaviors are a reaction to something I've done, not that they're just doing their thing.

It pleasured him to believe that we were happy, that all us stayed with him because we wanted to, not because we had to, that we didn't want to be free. I imagine that's what he told hisself to make it right.

Don't waste your time crying over what you're not given. When you have tears in your eyes, you can't see all the beautiful things around you.

I'm trying to impress upon my students that everyone has history. Just because we're not always happy with what's true doesn't mean we shouldn't know it. It's how we learn. It's how we do better in the future. Hopefully, anyway.

the secret to a good life isn't in getting what you want; it's in learning to want what you get. I'm learning to want what I've got and not to think about the rest so much.

We can never really know, except in hindsight, how prayers will be answered.

Beyond that, I want them to see that there is no faster way to change your circumstance than to open a great book.

Ever'body got story. Ever'body got a reason for what they do. You eat off somebody else's plate, drink a their cup, could be, you'd be the same way.

When we look only at our own plans, we miss the infinite possibilities of a greater plan.

Along our journey, people and events flow into us, and we are created of everywhere and everyone we have passed. Each event, each person, changes us in some way. Even in times of drought we are still moving and growing, but it is during seasons of rain that we expand the most-when water flows from all directions, sweeping at terrifying speed, chasing against rocks, spilling over boundaries. These are painful times, but they enable us to carry burdens we could never have thought possible.

My pappy used to say, any day you don't find a reason to laugh is like livin' two days, neither one of them worth a whit.

People around me invited me into homes that operated on a schedule and where parents spoke encouraging words. They showed me what a stable life could look like. If they hadn't bothered, how would I have even known there was another way to live? You can't aspire to something you've never seen.

Stories provide a rare chance to temporarily suspend being in your own body, in your own life, and to slip into the very existence of another person.

It's funny how from seventeen to seventy can be the blink of an eye, all of a sudden.

think. The great thing about literature is that it's subjective. No two readers read the same book, because we all see the words through different eyes, filter the story through different life experiences.

That's what I'd say in my essay about To Kill a Mockingbird, I decided. I'd make sure the English teacher knew that the story of Jem and Scout and Atticus Finch wasn't just words someone made up in a book. There were people who lived it—people of all different

E]veryone has history. Just because we're not always happy with what's true doesn't mean we shouldn't know it.