Quotes About Perspective

in a decade you'll be eighty-five, and then the only difference between you and a raisin will be that while you're both wrinkled and without a prostate, the raisin never had a prostate to begin with.

She shrugged. "I don't mind getting old." "I didn't mind getting old when I was young, either," I said. "It's the being old now that's getting to me." Her

I don't mind getting old." "I didn't mind getting old when I was young, either," I said. "It's the being old now that's getting to me.

She dropped dead mid-sentence, still pissy. On one hand, she really didn't feel it, which I suppose isn't a bad thing. On the other hand, well. I think it came as a surprise to her that she could die.

As well as you can, live the life you want to live and make the work you want to make. After you're gone it'll all be sorted out or not. You won't be around to worry about it. Focus on the parts you're around for.

I'm guessing you thought I was way off on your political philosophy but right on the button about the other two. Just think about that for a while.

All the thinking about the steps beyond what we were directly doing. It never makes you happy. It never solves anything for you, right now.

If you can't write a comment that isn't ultimately a segue into topics you feel are important, ask yourself why everything has to be about you.

Our thinking minds are so full of beliefs about how things "should be" rather than how things "are" that we refuse to accept reality as it is. We

So you see, a man's history when other folks tell it is a pitiful confusion.

Loved ones are sometimes taken from us, either by death or other circumstances outside our control. Yes, we should lament their departure and yes, we should pray for them often. But we shouldn't dwell so deeply upon such vacancies that life itself becomes empty.

I'm not trying to save the world, much of it is not worth saving.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

No one who is young is ever going to be old.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.

I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments

There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers...

This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from I to we. If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into I, and cuts you off forever from the we.

If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.