Quotes About Perspective

She realised that she hadn't tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.

Other animals don't have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn't progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve, you should know that by now.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

If we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be happy; we can't be happy.

We only know what we perceive.  Everything we perceive is ultimately just our perception of it. It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

There was an old musician's cliché, about how there were no wrong notes on a piano.

you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.

And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar.

It' hard to explain depression to people who haven't suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren't there. You have to resort to metaphors.

You're overthinking this, Nora,' said Ravi. 'I have no other type of thinking available.

Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast. It is sometimes better just to eat the toast.

He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things "one day at a time," as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

The longer you live, the more you realize that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realize their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their world views challenged and disproved. Everyone would realize the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing .

I've never had a coconut chilli Martini before,' I tell him. 'That's the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.' 'Oh, I don't know,' he says, still the optimist. 'I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It's the mana, you see. It's everywhere. It's never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.

Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge.

When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value.

Love is anxiety's greatest killer. Love is an outward force. It is our road out of our own terrors, because anxiety is an illness that wraps us up in our own nightmares. [...] Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.