Quotes About Perspective

Listening is crucial for any novelist. Stories & ideas abound. We too often talk about ourselves & block out the richness others may offer.

A good novel takes the reader into the heart of another person. It lands you smack into the life and times of someone else.

A book being read is a transaction between author & reader, a sharing, giving, taking & a reimagining of the author's offering.

You are what you read. You write what you are.

A good novel is an intensely personal rendezvous between reader and writer.

Dealing with truth is tough. In a sense, we're all unreliable narrators.

Writing is a way of remaking the world, both for the writer and reader.

People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.

The world is exactly as it appears, if only you look hard enough.

People say you can't have peace without a war, but on the contrary they say they don't support war. You can not, ever achieve happiness from focusing on suffering, you have to change your perspective. World peace starts with Inner peace.

What if I have it all upside down? What if I'm the one who knows nothing of God, and the people in the world are actually interceding on my behalf with their ordinary daily struggles

Most of us find it easy to knock things. We always know what we don't like, and we tend to highlight problems and issues rather than build on the elements that we do like.

We own nothing in our lives but perspective.

You think the dead really care about our lives? -Yeah, I think they do. I think they forgive us our sins. -I even think it's easy for them.

My dad used to say the best place to look for sympathy was somewhere between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

An old man who's happy not to have cowshit on his neck.

We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.

discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

The past is another country, but the Seventies is another planet.

Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a "community organizer." I'm not sure that's progress--and it's certainly not "sustainable.

I grow into my death. My life is small and getting smaller. The world is green. Nothing is all.

I walk into what light there is — Mark Strand, from "Another Place," Collected Poems (Knopf Doubleday, 2014)

These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

I want to invite you to look at all your beliefs deeply and see if any are limiting you in any way