Quotes About Perspective

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

Tell me what matters, BZ said. Nothing, Maria said.

I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.

Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.

For forty years I saw myself thru John's eyes. I did not age.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.

It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano's situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.

We tell each other stories in order to live.

Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.

if someone "chose" you, what does that tell you? Doesn't it tell you that you were available to be "chosen"? Doesn't it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world? The one who "chose" you? And the other who didn't?

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.

My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.

There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

Discussion of how California has 'changed,' then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.

In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.

Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.

Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present, or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.