Quotes About Perspective

Don't think I'm a bad mother. I'm just a realistic one. I knew that Jacob was handsome, funny, and so smart it sometimes left me reeling. It was hard though for others to see him in that light. To them, he just seemed odd.

My sister's in pain, and I'm relieved. What does that say about me?

were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations. Once, at a neighborhood dinner party, Lacy had asked him what happened if you had no expectations. You couldn't divide by zero. Did that mean if you just let yourself roll with all of life's punches, you could never be happy?

The people we define as crazy just might be more sane than you and me.

Do we grieve because the person we lost was such a light in the world? Or do we grieve because of who he was to us?

One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you've already lived. And you think, How did this happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young.

Happiness wasn't just what you reported; it was also how you chose to remember.

I tell them that there is nothing more selfish than trying to change someone's mind because they don't think like you. Just because something is different does not mean it should not be respected.

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.

JUST SO YOU KNOW, WHEN THEY SAY "ONCE UPON a time"… they're lying. It's not once upon a time. It's not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

I remember reading a novel once that said the native Alaskans who came in contact with the white missionaries thought, at first, they were ghosts. And why shouldn't they have thought that? Like ghosts, white people move effortlessly through through boundaries and borders. Like ghosts, we can be anywhere we want to be.

Put ten people together in a Laundromat and chances are you won't be the one who's worst off

What if it turns out that a life isn't defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next? p 418

It was tough to admit to yourself that someone else had more courage than you would in the same situation, or that it was possible to love someone in a way that you had not personally experienced.

When I was little I used to read the obituaries and one day I asked my mother why people die in alphabetical order.

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. I can no longer tell the sky from the sea, but I can hear the waves. A loss of sight; a gain of insight.

Kiedy nie ma siÄ™ nic oprócz mÅ'otka, wszystko wyglÄ…da jak gwó?d?.

One person's disability is another person's culture." As

I was starting to see that the past might color the future, but it didn't determine it. And if I could believe that, it was much easier to let go of what I'd done wrong.

not for the first time I think that someone's enterprising idea of therapy is another person's frustrated hell.

Put ten people together in a Laundromat and chances are you won't be the one who's worst off.

Could something that looked so wrong on the outside turn out to be undeniably right? My

Once, when her brothers had been fighting over who got more spaghetti for dinner, her mother had said, 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.