Quotes About Perspective

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent.

I have a strong theory that all the dead people are looking down and laughing and smiling and saying "Oh look, they are so upset about the death thing."

Well," I said, "after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent." "Is that it?" "Maybe. Who knows.

People think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.

It's not being angry that's important, it's being angry about the right things. I told her, Look at it from the Darwinian perspective. Anger is to make you effective. That's its survival function. That's why it's given to you. If it makes you ineffective, drop it like a hot potato.

The sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart—all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead—but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.

It's not your fault that you don't know what Gentiles think when they read something like this.

That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.

But there's no remaking reality

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

No es preciso tener una visión evolucionada de la vida para ansiar poder, ni para alcanzarlo. De hecho, una visión evolucionada de la vida puede ser el peor obstáculo, mientras que la carencia de esa visión puede ser la ventaja más espléndida.

All the great thoughts he had not reached were beyond enumeration; there was no bottom to what he did not have to say about the meaning of his life.

the me who's not me encamped boldly in Jewish Jerusalem while I go underground with the Arabs.

Destiny had become perfectly understandable while everything unenigmatic, such as standing for the photograph in the third row back, with my one arm on the shoulder of Marshall Goldstein ("Children 39, 37. Grandchildren 8, 6") and my other on the shoulder of Stanley Wernikoff ("Children 39, 38. Grandchildren 5, 2, 8 mo."), had become inexplicable.

fingerprint—it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.

Depraved? Officer Balich, you are too old to idealize your parents.

By the time she was their age, she'd seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmullers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the René Clairs, all the Wim Wenderses, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars.

No solo eso; es que, además, la realidad puede permitirse el lujo de ser increíble, inexplicable, de situarse fuera de toda proporción.

How you think matters more than what you think