Quotes About Perspective

there are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.

I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.

We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.

Essay's roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.

Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.

I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn't share his particular faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times.

Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved

I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter. Does that make any sense?

Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.

Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she'd left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes.

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.

A person accustoms himself to what he is, after all, and if he's lucky he learns to hold in somewhat lower esteem all other ways of being, so as not to spend life envying them.

Does the world really need more amateur photographs of giraffes?

With public opinion, he said, there's weather, and then there's climate. You're trying to change the climate, and that takes time.

She'd visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she'd had her fill of the place.

Ma ora si rendeva conto che quello, come tradimento, era così piccolo che faceva ridere. Così piccolo che faceva piangere.

His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome.

So I envy animals. Dogs especially, because nothing smells bad to them.

His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

To herself, she was no longer the person who'd left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person.

Now that I'm blind, I can see there is nothing to see.

he remembered how it would feel to be unmoved by the stores, unwanting of anything in them, and how much dimmer the lights

He was like a person in two dimensions seeking freedom in a third.