Quotes About Perspective

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them.

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool.

Albert Campion: 'I'm serious!' Lugg: 'That's unhealthy in itself.

But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.

Women are terribly shocking to men, my dear. Don't understand them. Like them. It saves such a lot of hurting one way and the other.

The door through which he had glimpsed such wondrous light, he had walked through. He had encountered both beauty and pain. Now he understood that was how it would always be—no matter where he went in the world.

Different versions of a true story

We believe what we want to believe." page 109

There are two different worlds, the light world and the dark world. The question is: Which one wins? Answer: The one you feed, baby. The one you feed.

Poor me. No one understands me. They don't love me. My family is the cause of my misery. I can't believe he gave that job to her, not to me." Victims may want to be rescued, but they don't want to be reminded of their inadequacies. Not taking responsibility for their actions is the hallmark of Victim behavior. Another defining characteristic is oversensitivity and clinging to their glass-half-empty perspective of life.

I was a jealous little she-reader; I resented pouring myself into the lives of hero-boys.

Criticism does demand a certain kind of authority, but what about the authority of not really being sure what you think?

I felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realized before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person's - or the next fish's, or the next grass-blade's! - and not a whit less.

How sweet it was to be scolded by such a tiny.

sometimes the biggest influence isn't what's present in your life, but what's absent. Those missing pieces that shape you and change you, the silences that are louder than the noise.

Stories can seem like tragedies, depending where they stopped.

When a person assumes that his or her revelation is the only true one, it only says that this person has had very few religious revelations and hasn't realized how many there are.

We gaze up at the same stars, the sky covers us all, the same universe encompasses us. What does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for the truth? Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret. —SYMMACHUS, 384 C.E.

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

What a pity, when Christopher Colombus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.

All along, he'd been looking in the wrong direction, trying to make time stand still, to re-create the past, but everything in life taught the opposite.