Quotes About Perspective

Oh, Ma, how little I understood you, thinking how little you understood.

The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.

Auden wrote somewhere that no matter what the age of the company, he was always convinced he was the youngest in the room; me, too.

I see them there, my poor parents, rancorously playing at house in the childhood of the world. Their unhappiness was one of the constants of my earliest years, a high, unceasing buzz just beyond hearing. I did not hate them. I loved them, probably. Only they were in my way, obscuring my view of the future. In time I would be able to see right through them, my transparent parents.

remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.

There is no way to master the fact with which I live.

The story of your life is not your life. It is your story.

All the same, they [young, twenty-somethings] can't help feeling that the aged and even the infirm have somehow elected that condition ... or have as it were been assigned those roles ... so that they ... can play their youthful-energetic, all but immutable selves.

The necessity for an observer makes perfect observation impossible.

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

Imprisoned in a cage of sound Even the trivial seems profound

In essence he declared, "If I have to choose between Your presence and Your blessing, I'll take Your presence—even if it's in a place of lack and hardship—over Your blessing in a great environment.

We fix our attention, not on things that are seen, but on things that are unseen" (2 Corinthians 4:18 TEV). That which is unseen is the Word of God. His Word is just and accurate.

Some scholars believe there have been approximately two billion Christians on this earth from the time of Jesus's resurrection until this day. The chances are very slim, but if it so happens that you're the least of those two billion believers, you're still greater than John the Baptist—which means you're greater than Daniel. The questions that now arise are, do you really know who you are?

What you learn is often determined by what you need to know. If you think you're weak, you will learn that you are strong. If you think you are indestructible, you will learn that you are fragile. In the end though, you will learn that you are human. You are no more and no less than all those who are learning their lessons as you learn yours.

Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?' I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. 'What irony?' I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. 'That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.

And then the room went very dark and somehow, despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let it go.

We're accustomed to the older generation looking down on the younger and telling them that they know nothing of the world. But things are rather out of kilter now, aren't they? It is your generation who understands the inhumanity of man, not ours. It's boys like you who have to live with what you have seen and what you have done. You've become the generation of response. While your elders can only look in your direction and wonder.

What you know about women," replied Maude, "could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there'd still be room for the Lord's Prayer. For all your

no man with any sense should marry the girl to whom he loses his virginity. It's like learning to drive in some clapped-out old banger and then holding on to it for the rest of your life when you've developed the skill to handle a BMW in rush-hour traffic on a busy Autobahn.

I had told the truth, or a version of it, anyway.

I married up several times. And then across once or twice. And then beneath me. I never quite found the right level somehow. Perhaps I should have married diagonally or in a slightly curved direction.

I'm not praying, she said. I'm remembering. Sometimes the two things look alike, that's all.

You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who's gone terribly and then it's not grief at all, it's more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you.