Quotes About Perspective

As we think, we might remember that it matters not only with whom and what we choose to think; it also matters what spirit we choose to think with.

That's my depression talking. It's not "me." 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

I want the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person never need apply.

In one of my favorites of your drawings, 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 off their sticks.

It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional.

What if where I am is what I need?' Before you, I had always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even a catastrophic situation. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too

Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.

I would also like to cop easily to my abundant privilege - except that the notion of privilege as something to which one could "easily cop," as in "cop to once and be done with," is ridiculous. Privilege saturates, privilege structures.

How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK--desirable, even--whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? 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?

Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought

I can go for days without thinking about it; at other times it feels like a defining moment. It means nothing. It means everything.

What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don't go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

What I wish I had known, aged twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don't go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

If he keeps himself at the hub of this life in London, nothing can touch him. Here, in this skiff, in this city, in this life, he can almost persuade himself that if he were to return, he would find them as they were, unchanged, untrammelled, three children asleep in their beds. He uncovers his eyes, lifts them to the jumbled roofs of houses, dark shapes above the flexing, restless surface of the river. He shuts his long-sighted eye and stares down the city with an imperfect, watery gaze.

She cannot imagine how it might be, to see him again. He would be a child and she is now grown, almost a woman. What would he think? Would he recognise her now, if he were to pass her in the street, this boy who will for ever remain a boy? Several

Qué curioso, piensa ella, tener a otro tan cerca: la escala desbordante de las pestañas, de los párpados cerrados, del pelo de la frente, todo mirando hacia el mismo sitio.

THAT THE THINGS IN LIFE WHICH DON'T GO TO PLAN ARE USUALLY MORE IMPORTANT, MORE FORMATIVE, IN THE LONG RUN, THAN THE THINSGS THAT DO

It was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer. Nearly losing my life at the age of eight made me sanguine - perhaps to a fault - about death. I knew it would happen, at some point, and the idea didn't scare me; its proximity felt instead almost familiar. The knowledge that I was lucky to be alive, that it so easily could have been otherwise, skewed my thinking.

After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was 'fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness'.

I think about the person I was in my mid 20's. I consider her. I try to recall how it felt to be that age. What were the frameworks of her days? The patterns of her thoughts? I am as far from her now as she was from her childhood. She is the median line between me and my birth.

Some days seem to fit together like a stained glass window. A hundred little pieces of different color and mood that, when combined, create a complete picture.

I tell you, it's funny because the only time I think about HIV is when I have to take my medicine twice a day.

Those men are wise who do not desire the unattainable, who do not love to mourn over what is lost, and are not overwhelmed by calamities.

If they say anything other than that they would make a decision, it is fair to push back: "I'm confused. It seems that even if I were to get you what you want, just the way you want it, it would not help you say yes or no. What's missing?