Quotes About Perspective

To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.

I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?

recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred

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

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see,we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

The error, if it was an error, had been there from the beginning. I left it as it was. Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying. It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight. He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.

Why did I keep stressing what was and was not normal, when nothing about it was?

De ce trebuie s? ai mereu dreptate, îmi spunea el. N-a înÈ›eles vreodat? c? în mintea mea n-aveam niciodat? dreptate.

the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.

a vida muda rapidamente. a vida muda em um instante. você se senta para jantar, e a vida que você conhecia termina. a questão da autopiedade.

Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?

I'm not optimistic, darling, but I'm hopeful. There's a difference. I'm hopeful.

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. –Joan Didion

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car. I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

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

Devi avere sempre ragione? , ricordai che John diceva. Era una lamentela, un'accusa, parte di una contesa. Non aveva mai capito che dentro di me non avevo mai ragione.

Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations.