Quotes About Perspective

Why are we so hard on ourselves?" Asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it's not that I'm so hard on myself exactly, it's that I've learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own.

I think how easy it would be to go through life as a goat. You don't have any problems. You don't fall in love, so you don't get crushed by loss. You just have your simple, farm-animal life, which I envy now.

He loved the way women, clothed, had a bosom, a single entity, but when unclothed, it cleaved into two discrete parts, two breasts, like the way you could separate an orange into halves by hooking thumbs into it.

The more you were not with a person, the more your lives diverged.

It's weird," she said, "the way sometimes you're in your life, but other times you're looking back at it like a spectator. It kind of goes back and forth, back and forth." "And then you die." She laughed a little. "Yes. And then you die.

People wanted one another to do something. They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else.

The voice. It doesn't just matter what you say. It matters who does the saying. It matters whose voice it is.

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you.

It's like we kept trying to use the same rules," Greer said, "and these people kept saying to us, 'Don't you get it? I will not live by your rules.'" She took a breath. "They always get to set the terms. I mean, they just come in and set them. They don't ask, they just do it. It's still true.

the Olympian vantage point that time provides:

Twitter. You know what it is? Termites with microphones.

But, she knew, you didn't have to marry your soulmate, and you didn't even have to marry an Interesting. You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed, for her.

In the past, people appreciated artwork. Now artwork appreciates?

What you knew, felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had always perhaps been there, though to a lesser extent.

You needed to find a way to make your world dynamic, Greer knew. Sometimes you couldn't do it yourself. Someone had to see something in you and speak to you in a way that no one else ever had.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start—the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant—and then it does start and you realize it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for.

I picture him always like he's looking at us through glass—windshields, sliding patio doors.

You never think your life will be that big.    Just

in the end all the things you think matter are just disappointment and noise.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start-- her past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant-- and then it does start and you realize it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for.

All these years later, the story of their parents' end, passed down like lore, still seemed unbearably romantic to their students—less so to Marie, who, after sobbing violently next to her sister, Dara, through the funeral, insisted, I never saw them hold hands once.

If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn't there a kind of terrible beauty in it?

The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.