Quotes About Perspective

It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but—if that is the metaphor—you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.

In the face of death, life seemed more attractive.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

An impossibility is just a possibility you don't understand yet.

But as things stood, there weren't even two fun days. They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday's liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week's solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull.

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.

Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

I didn't go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn't see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide, they pass right through.

Thoreau wrote, 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

There is no right or wrong way to have depression, or to have a panic attack, or to feel suicidal.

In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality, yes, but not an escape from truth.

That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can't be tamed.

It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky.

The glacial landscape reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised - almost everything she has bought and worked for and consumed - had taken her away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.

You see, when you look at events in history there is a two-way perspective. Forwards and back. But at the time everything is one way.

As a species, we love to divide things up. We draw a straight line in a map between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans while the water remains oblivious.

The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn't this objective unchangeable thing called "The World." No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds.

The world is real, but your world is subjective. Changing your perspective changes your planet.

But it is helpful to remember that our perspective is our world. And our external circumstances don't need to change in order for our perspective to change. And the forests we find ourselves in are metaphorical, and sometimes we are unable to escape them, but with a change of perspective we can live among the trees.

I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don't know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren't. 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.

it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

I am just saying if you knew about me there would be a very strong chance you would think I was insane.

It was making me think about human life in a way I didn't want to think about it. Human life, I realized, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things.