Quotes About Perspective

Mom. She always says to look at the big picture. How all of the little things don't matter in the long run. . . I know that Mom is right about the big picture. But Dad is right too: Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other. The dots matter.

Life was a too-tall stack of books that had started to lean to one side, and each new day was another book on top.

If you took every tear cried by everyone on earth on one single day and put them in a container, how big would that container need to be? Could you fill a water tower? Three water towers? It's one of those unknowable things. There has to be an answer, but we'll never know what it is.

Em: I'm falling apart. That's what I'm trying to tell you Bridge: You're not falling apart. You're scared. Em: Isn't that the same thing? Bridge: No

Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.

Thank you for showing me your planet.

Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore. She doesn't mean that it's a real veil. And it isn't about magic, or some idea that maybe God is looking right at you, or an angel is sitting next to you, or anything like that. Mom doesn't think in those ways. It's just her way of saying that most of the time, people get distracted by little stuff and ignore the big stuff.

He nodded like he felt sorry for me and my stupid brain. 'I think that's probably because of your common sense. You can't accept the idea of arriving before you leave, the idea that every moment is happening at the same time, that it's us who are moving—' Enough was enough.

It's weird, because I know Mom is right about the big picture. But Dad is right too: Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other. The dots matter.

Sometimes the truth is dramatic.

Look, I know Mom talks about the big picture. She wants you to remember that you'll find new friends, that life is always changing, sometimes in really good ways. But life is also what's happening now, Georges.

It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

I realized that if I had said to them, "You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket," they would have nodded and said, "Yes," and if I had gone on and said, "But you yourselves have only second-class tickets," they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.

It is always dangerous to view our collective lives without the benefit of history or without regard to diversity among us.

The author's differing experience of school geography as a faculty member going from parking lot to parking lot and to locations centered around HER office and her experience of the more scattered life of a student speaks to a larger truth. As adults, we are used to following the same routine and look romantically on anything different.

Old age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.

toilet. And