Quotes About Perspective

To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think.

All distances are the same to those who don't meet.

Old age is not the same thing as historical interest,' he said. 'Otherwise we should both of us be more interesting than we are.

She read to find out what it was like to be French or Russian in the nineteenth century, to be a rich New Yorker then, or a Midwestern pioneer. She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.

History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.

My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

M]aze-treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas maze-viewers who see the pattern whole, from above or in a diagram, are dazzled by its complex artistry. What you see depends on where you stand . . . Our perception of labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable: change your perspective and the labyrinth seems to change.

Travel broadens one's scope," he explained. "Anytime you do any traveling, your scope will be broadened. It doesn't mean you change, you broaden.

As I'm fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it's straight ahead.

Life speeds by and no matter how much joy there is, there is sadness.

Proselytizing is a moral imperative and feeds the marketplace of ideas. I want to hear everyone tell the truth as they see it. I want to learn from everyone.

even the Christian heaven is just real human hell. Add eternal to anything, even eating pussy while listening to Dylan, and you get hell.

I'm the son of Yancy and Nita Allen, but more importantly, I'm a child of God. I realized that none of the rest of it was that important. Most days, that's enough. Sometimes I still fall into that trap of feeling sorry for myself, but it doesn't last long.

Lady Beckenham snorted and said there was nothing on God's earth as unrewarding as the human baby.

Oh, other people's happiness, especially when it is ill-won, is hard to bear when you are unhappy yourself,' he said. 'I should know.

When I started on this I had forty-forty vision.

I must say this has revised my view that nothing could be worse than a wedding. There not being a wedding.

Don't forget that, Celia. There's more to life than flowery words and orgasms.

I wonder what goes through his mind when he sees us peeing in his water bowl.

Is it the darkness that is light, or the luminous that is dark? A choice must be made. The same is true of history; people choose what to see, what is light and what is darkness.

But life had shifted its weight from one point to another, from one leg to the other, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for.

On that island was a lighthouse I had seen every single summer of my entire life and my mother, too, had seen it her entire life, and I wondered how it might affect your way of thinking, if you always had a lighthouse in the corner of your eye.