Quotes About Perspective

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

That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Los recuerdos se borran, la memoria se adapta, la memoria se ajusta a lo que creemos recordar.

Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout.

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity.

we tell ourselves stories in order to live..

Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then?

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?

I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

We all have our own trips and it is a nice drive.

Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger.

What gives those December days a year ago their sharper focus is their ending

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

people whose names would tell a different story, although not necessarily to a different hundred people.

Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

I WAS trained to distrust other people's versions, but we go with what we have. We triangulate the coverage. Handicap for bias. Figure in leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation. Consider what filter is on the lens. So to speak.

It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

When my father was told that I had been rejected from Stanford, he shrugged and offered me a drink.

History is context.

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

Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty or twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.