Quotes About Perspective

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn't all about me?

That's what love is, when your hindsight is 20/20, and you still wouldn't change a thing.

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.

On a really dark night, you can see between 1,000 and 1,500 stars, and there are millions more that haven't been discovered. It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all. -Brian Fitzgerald

There is no one truth. There's only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?

If you think about someone you've loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.

Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life.

Sometimes the key to happiness is just expecting a little bit less

She shrugged. You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.

We all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn't have any.

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

My teacher in first grade said that long ago people used to believe all kinds of things, because they didn't know any better. Like you shouldn't take a bath, because it could make you sick. And then someone saw germs under a microscope and started to think differently. You can believe something really hard, and still be wrong. (Faith White)

If you never go out on that limb, you're missing a hell of a view.

Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, this too shall pass - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

In my previous life I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be- but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.

Love has nothing to do with what you're looking at and everything to do with who's looking.

The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there's no right way and wrong way to do it. We're all just wired differently. It's also worth noting that when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he's right or left-handed. After all: does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?

From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.

The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It's always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place.

The first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wond one day and heal the next.

You can't blame someone if they honestly don't understand that their reality isn't the same as yours.