Quotes About Perspective

The tales we tell ourselves about ourselves make us who we are.

Right now I feel guilty to be alive. Why? Because I'm wasting it. I've been given this life and all I do is mope it away. What's worse is, I am totally aware of how ridiculous I am. It would be a lot easier if I believed I was the center of the universe, because then I wouldn't know any better not to make a big deal out of everything. I know how small my problems are, yet that doesn't stop me from obsessing about them. I have to stop doing this.

Actually, how I am a defensive pessimist. I always assume the worst, so if the reality is even a wee bit better than my disaster scenario, it's a cause for celebration.

I'm psychology major who has no desire to work with people.

After all, you can't hang out at the park with your kid and shop for coordinating head scarves and flip-flops (or whatever else Bethany does to fill the endless expanse of nonworking days) without a college education. Oh, that's right. You totally can.

You get older, but you don't ever feel grown up

How do you react to something like that? How? How do you react when you find out the exact opposite of what you've been telling yourself is true?

History is written by the victors, which is certainly true, but it's also written by the wealthy and the literate.

The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us.

No 'Glory shall be your reward' for me. Oh, no, for me, it is, 'Stop whining' and 'Go to bed'.

If you called for nuance, you were part of the problem.

I accept that people with children are having a deeper, more complex experience of being alive than I am, and this is fine with me. Raising children is one of many life experiences I'm happy to die without having had, like giving birth, going to war, spending a night in jail, or seeing Forrest Gump. If I could get through life without experiencing death, I would gladly do that, too.

But in the outside world, in places (on the rare occasions I visited them) where the vast blankness of the land and sky made even the enormous supermarkets seem tiny, where, to many, words like "Vassar" were just a random sequence of letters, where weather mattered more than most anything else, I often felt lost, irrelevant, fatuous. I

It's amazing what the living expect of the dying.

the time I watched a knife fight outside the window of the studio in Greenwich Village, the time I got an HIV test at a Department of Health free clinic in order to prove some kind of point to myself (other than that I didn't have HIV, which I already knew).

Given the correlation between aging and death, declaring that you can't stand today's music might actually mark the first stage of the dying process.

Onlookers often respond to the experience of chronically ill people by focusing on the supposed positives, presumably because it makes the pain of witness bearable.

I think: it's the holidays. There are parties. I'm young. I've spent the past two years going to oncologists. I'm going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I'm not in your country, I think. I haven't lived in your country for a while.

To be chronically ill is to be in a state of ever-present "camouflaged grieving," as the historian Jennifer Stitt puts it. It was this ever-present grief I felt was being swept under the rug when my friend counseled me to see the good that had come of my illness. She wasn't wrong that something had come of it—but her quick counsel negated the complexity of the quest.

Alphonse Daudet observes in In the Land of Pain. "Everyone will get used to it except me.

is difficult to be a patient for long without coming up against the hard truth that what you are searching for and what your doctor is offering are two entirely different things.

My narrative is not a neat one. Which version of the story of my illness I tell depends on what month, what day, even what hour I do so, and whether my symptoms are in the background or the foreground.

Like many in their baby boomer generation, they saw doctors as unquestionable experts. You didn't go to them unless you had a high fever or a bad fall or a wound that needed stitching. In that case, you got a diagnosis, you took medicine or had surgery, and you got better, more or less in that order. But if the doctor told you nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong. My parents believed in the power of Western medicine, and therefore so did I.

Is illness, in any way, a lesson? Illness is a travesty; illness is shit; illness is not redemptive unless it happens to be for a particular ill person, for reasons that are not replicable nor should they be said to be so.