Quotes About Perspective

With my spyglass I can observe a woman who is reading on a terrace in the valley," I told her. "I wonder if the books she reads are calming or upsetting." "How does the woman seem to you? Calm or upset?" "Calm." "Then she reads upsetting books.

Es preciso que entre las cosas pensadas y las cosas no haya más diferencias. Entonces seremos felices.

So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others.

Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.

Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the "I," the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world.

Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.

Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change

La Ciudad es una para el que pasa sin entrar, y otra para el que está preso en ella; una es la ciudad a la que se llega la primera vez, otra la que se deja para no volver, cada una merece un nombre diferente.

In seguito a una serie di disavventure intellettuali che non meritano d'essere ricordate, il signor Palomar ha deciso che la sua principale attività sarà guardare le cose dal di fuori.

La vita d'una persona consiste in un insieme d'avvenimenti di cui l'ultimo potrebbe anche cambiare il senso di tutto l'insieme, non perché conti di più dei precedenti ma perché inclusi in una vita gli avvenimenti si dispongono in un ordine che non è cronologico, ma risponde a un'architettura interna.

And Polo answers, "Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities...

Chi vuole guardare bene la terra deve tenersi alla distanza necessaria.

Bir kentte hayran kald???n ?ey onun yedi ya da yetmi? yedi harikas? de?il, senin ona sordu?un bir soruya verdi?i yan?tt?r.

Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene. — Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu's, more separate and circumscribed than before.

Si arriva a un momento della vita in cui tra la gente che si è conosciuta i morti sono più dei vivi. E la mente si rifiuta di accettare altre fisionomie, altre espressioni: su tutte le facce nuove che incontra, imprime i vecchi calchi, per ognuna trova la maschera che s'adatta di più.

My brother maintains," I answered, "that those who wish to look carefully at the earth should stay at the necessary distance," and Voltaire very much admired the answer.

It just wasn't possible to make him accept a reality different from his own.

Pensé: —Uno llega a un momento de la vida en que de la gente que ha conocido son mas los muertos que los vivos. Y la mente se niega a aceptar otras fisonomías, otras expresiones: en todas las caras nuevas que encuentra, imprime los viejos calcos, para cada una encuentra la máscara que más se adapta.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

uno llega a un momento de la vida en que de la gente que ha conocido son mas los muertos que los vivos. Y la mente se niega aceptar otras fisonomías, otras expresiones: en todas las caras nuevas que encuentra, imprime los viejos calcos, para cada una encuentra la máscara que mas se adapta. ( Ciudad:Adelma)

Writing consists no longer in narrating but in sayin that one is narrating, and what one says becomes identified with the very act of saying. The psychological person is replaced by a linguistic or even a grammatical person, defined solely by his place in the discourse.

Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience. What can a poor nun know of the world?

The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.