Quotes About Perspective

If you have the patience to wait and watch, history will reshape truth (weakest of all forces, and weightless) in the image of opinion. What really happened will cease to matter and, eventually, cease to exist.

Life's pleasures were so simple, really. It was all a matter of appreciating what you had - and knowing that things could always be worse.

Perhaps the way to proceed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.

Trying to think inside Finn's head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees.

Julie helped him to feel defined. He was Julie's boyfriend. Julie's fiance. Julie's provocation. He came into focus when he stood beside her, despite the fact that the person standing beside her was mostly not him.

You don't always get a chance to choose the kind of news you get.

Gil me ha dicho que para traducir bien tienes que ser un camaleón, ponerte en la piel de otra persona, meterte en tu cabeza. He visto esa transformación en él; da la sensación de que sus rasgos, y a veces su personalidad, cambian con cada voz que adopta, con cada libro.

When people express nostalgia for youth, I always suspect they have inadequate recall.

but I can't remember much about life before the war anyway so it doesn't count in my book, which this is.

Dear, dear," Ivan said, eyebrow raised. "So this is what Kansas looks like.

We're talking about the novel, right? But maybe we're not. We're talking about ourselves. And I guess that's what can start to happen when you talk about a book.

Well," said Ash, and she got out of her own bed and came to sit beside Jules. "I've always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're not what you thought. And that's what makes them strange . The reality is really different from the fantasy.

Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?" "Hmm," said Jules. "Yes. The Holocaust.

Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story.

Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they're parched, as though they're plants, as though the page they're working on would look completely different with a southern exposure.

Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. Once she realized this it began to trouble her. Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world. Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.

to find out what another human being feels, a person who isn't you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That's what writing is supposed to do.

sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.

Even when I can't relate on a personal level, she makes me know what she feels, and that's really something. To find out what another human being feels, a person who isn't you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That's what writing is supposed to do.

Everything you do, it'll all feel really slow for a long time. But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast.

Yeah, you were lucky you got to come here when you did. But what was most exciting about it when you were here was the fact that you were young. That was the best part.

Everyone tended to believe everything was their fault; maybe it was just hard to imagine, when you were still fairly young, that there were some things in the world that were just not about you .

Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually wasn't exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood?

Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly.