Quotes About Perspective

How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?

Sara: You are so brave, I tell her, and then I smile. When I grow up, I want to be just like you. To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. No Mommy, she says. You'd be sick.

We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.

Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

I don't know why it's called getting lost. Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.

Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

You figured that the only way I'd be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.

Risk always looks different when you're beating the system than when you've been beaten.

We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.

what made you happy once might not make you happy now.

I realized it was like looking into the sun—you shouldn't do it, because you'd turn your face away and be blind to everything else.

There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.

You don't look at another person's plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough.

it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

I wish I could tell him I understand: the higher you raise your hopes, the farther you have to fall.

Life asked death, "Why do people love me but hate you?" Death responded, "Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth." —Unknown

Busy is just a euphemism for being so focused on what you don't have that you never notice what you do. It's a defense mechanism. Because if you stop hustling—if you pause—you start wondering why you ever thought you wanted all those things.

What if instead of focusing on what you don't have, you concentrate on what you've got?

If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.

Oh,that's right. You're a...what did you call it? Ah, a ghost hunter. You don't have to see things to believe them. Adam's gaze locked onto the persecutor's. Maybe you've got that backward, he said. Maybe it's just that I believe things you cant see.

Once, I asked my mom why stars shine. She said they were night-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven. But when I asked my dad, he started talking about gas, and somehow I put it all together and figured that the food God served caused multiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Life is not a plot; it's in the details.

When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.