Quotes About Perspective

You can leave the books that you don't like alone, and let other people read them- ancient scholar Yuan Chunglang

I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I like to ask; How is this book changing mine?

was just that she felt you were missing the main point—you were focused on one thing when you should have been focused on another.

Really, whenever you read something wonderful, it changes your life, even if you aren't aware of it.

Here is Chang Ch'ao on reading at different times in your life: "Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depth of one's own experience.

It's three hours, and I know I probably won't feel up for it, but if I'm going to feel rotten, I'd rather feel rotten watching something wonderful than just sitting in the living room, looking at the wall.

even the stay-at-home mothers subjected their kids to a kind of benign neglect back then.

I asked Mom why she thought that was, and she pointed out that joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they've realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.

don't like being interrupted either—but I interrupt other people. I often forget that other people's stories aren't simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor.

I often forget that other people's stories aren't simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor.

Girls Like Us by the journalist Sheila Weller,

It is my habit to buy cheap editions of old, obscure books and see what I can discover there. If the professors of literature knew the sources of my ideas, they would be astounded at the Philistine. But there is a greater pleasure in picking up a small pearl in an ash-can than in looking at a large one in a jeweler's window.

most of the unexpected changes we react to will turn out to be of no importance:

Whenever and whatever happened to alter the boy's view of the world so radically, from the moment that it happened, Mackay's story becomes one of subservience to the contrary will within him that he calls God.

I hate flowers to death. What are they for? You cannot eat them. They die in a day. They are a complete waste of money.

My mom's never been married. I've never even seen my mom kiss a dude.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing desire.

I get all fired up about aging in America.

There aren't two worlds, education and work; there is one world-life. Learning by hands-on participation .... should be at the heart of our educational perspective.

In art one idea is as good as another.

The past does not influence me; I influence it.