Quotes About Perspective

T-shirt with the slogan "Officer, I Swear to Drunk I'm Not God.

jurors can't help themselves. They're swayed by their life experiences as much as the evidence and the law. Still, with all my bellyaching, here's the strange thing. Juries usually get it right!

In my playing days, like a lot of jocks, I hung out at places like the Booby Trap and Cheetah and other strip joints. Booze and breasts and wasted nights. Maybe getting older and presumably wiser ain't such a bad deal.

Women, I have long believed, are the more evolved of the species and have attained some higher level of being. Men act as if we just crawled from the swamp, our webbed feet dripping brackish water as we waddle ashore, seeking to mate with a female or, lacking that, a warm patch of mud.

My desk was covered with little white telephone messages. Office confetti. You think the universe comes to a halt when you are locked into your own little world, but it doesn't. It goes on whether you're in trial or at war or under the surgeon's knife. Or dead.

the news is often accurate without being truthful.

Instead of focusing on isolated objects and events, we can expand our fixed perspective and allow the deeper process (often taking the form of a mythic narrative of some sort) that is animating events to reveal itself. Instead of superimposing our limiting ideas and beliefs onto the waking dream, we can allow life to show its dreamlike nature to us.

How do we even talk about the future when there's less and less of it every minute?

Nothing recedes into the vanishing point of time's rear-view faster than the truth.

Pick up the world and turn it over, as Mama liked to say, and you won't find fair written anywhere on it.

How to tell a story? First find a point of view.

I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.

Sadness isn't sadness. It's happiness in a black jacket. Tears are not tears. They're balls of laughter dipped in salt. Death is not death. It's life that's jumped off a tall cliff.

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.

The key to success is having the awareness to appreciate – in the words of the French novelist Anaïs Nin 'we see the world not as it is but as we are.' It's recognizing that we see events through our own mental filters and give our own meaning to those events – a meaning which may be very different to someone else's.

Even on especially hard days, I began to notice him everywhere, setting a table before me in the presence of my enemies, pursuing me with his love. Both the child and the cynic walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The cynic focuses on the darkness; the child focuses on the Shepherd.

How do you think poetry helps people? he'd ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps.

Good days are such a mysterious gift that you dare not question them much, and the only problem is they give you a false sense of security.

I know white folks, they can't take it. Because all of their lives, white people have been told they're the shit. White people always told you 'You're the best, you're everything, you're wonderful, you come from heaven, you're eve-ry-thing, you've never done nothing to nobody, you wear the white hat, you're the good fucking guy,' and the minute they hear [a] a nigga talking about [race] it freaks em.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit. And often that is quite a lot.

In fact, during my research and interviews with McKinsey alumni, the Talk element of the model was consistently ranked the most important of all interpersonal elements. Why is it that the simple act of talking can cause so many problems in team problem solving? Generally, because we don't have specific Rules of Engagement; because we like to speak more often than we listen; and because we get personally attached to our own points of view.

Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers, especially when you do not know what the answers are. I didn't give a shit either way.

It takes a special, ironic kind of person to use their own impending death as an impetus to finally live.