Quotes About Perspective

He thought about how life never turns out like you think and hope it will.

The day she realized that there were many ways to go, and Mother's was only one way. Not necessarily the right way, and not at all the wrong way. Just one of the many ways ahead.

The past is never really gone. It's always with us, shaping who we are.

Sometimes the most important things in life are the things we take for granted.

Want wisdom? Laugh at yourself.

If that's what dying is like, I think I can do it!

I read everything, both serious and funny. Dickens, Thackeray, Rider Haggard, PG Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe, and the endless wailing of Virginia Woolf, thin terrible books where nothing happened.

And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

51. You might as well act as if objects had the colors, The Encyclopedia says. –Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise?

We have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it.

Stop working against the world, I counseled myself. Love the one you're with. Love the color green. But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.

two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, "You're more interested in fantasy than reality". The other responds, "I'm interested in the reality of my fantasy." Both of the Popsicles are melting of their sticks.

For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it's orange, that we're normal. 39.

220. Imagine someone saying, "Our fundamental situation is joyful." Now imagine believing it. 221. Or forget belief: imagine feeling, even if for a moment, that it were true.

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people fell about their gender or sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?

But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.

There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today", a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we "get around" in the wirld. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?