Quotes About Perspective

The idle mind, which demands rules, i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing with it, he will use imperfective, if he stands outside and merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use the perfective

Is there world enough for me?

What I don't want is to be called an octogenarian. I saw 'Octogenarian Jane Gardam' and I thought 'Blow me!' I mean, I am, but that's not the point." (Inteview, The Guardian, 8 January 2011)

Laywers, I suppose, were children once.

He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.

But it's true, she thought, nobody really knows a thing about another's past. Why should we? Different worlds we all inhabit from the womb.

Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways

As Carrie Fisher once said in a film, everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour.

it always made him feel better, and calmer, and more sane, to hold a book. He had never been able to understand people who did not read. He had never been able to understand how they held on to themselves.

had shocked him into speechlessness to realize that down-and-outs in New Jersey expected to have more in the way of amenities than coal miners and sharecroppers in most of West Virginia, and that people in the North believed that there was no one, anywhere, who still had to go out in the cold in the middle of the winter to use a chemical latrine.

Old age equalizes- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

When a man falls in love with a woman, it is like an arrow piercing the meadow; when a woman falls in love with a man, it is like grain scattered on rocks.

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades, what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion, I whose choices made her what she will be?

The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look… To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed.

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bash? instructed, "The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective." "Don't you mean too subjective or too objective?" his student asked. Bash? answered, simply, "No.

One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

An hour is not a house" An hour is not a house, a life is not a house, you do not go through them as if they were doors to another. Yet an hour can have shape and proportion, four walls, a ceiling. An hour can be dropped like a glass. Some want quiet as others want bread. Some want sleep. My eyes went to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

The griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance.

A person falling does not, mid-plummet, look up.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

The attitude of neutrality allows grandparents to listen to the teenager without the emotional baggage their parents carry. And if we listen carefully, we may be able to glimpse what the teenager is going through.

Mindful of the boundaries between us and our grown children, we make the effort to take the differences between us less personally

The elder generation may also take the opportunity to grow. Becoming a grandparent is the crowning event for many people, so why should it present a challenge? Because the rules are about to change, and promoting harmony in the family under new circumstances takes patience and modesty. It requires that the elder generation adopt a long view.