Quotes About Perspective

To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.

Yet every great storyteller knows it's the fine art of taking me by the hand and showing me that has the most effect on a reader's soul. It's how writers slip it all into us while we're not looking. While we're reading words, they're making magic happen, and when that magic lands right in our hearts, we're theirs forever.

No decent art ever came out of self-pity.

Dissociation gets you through a brutal experience, letting your basic survival skills operate unimpeded…Your ability to survive is enhanced as the ability to feel is diminished…All feeling are blocked; you 'go away.' You are disconnected from the act, the perpetrator & yourself…Viewing the scene from up above or some other out-of-body perspective is common among sexual abuse survivors.

Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match. ... One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.

The route had been renamed after the war, Sergeant Booth had told them in the taxi. Now it was known as the Road of Remembrance. To Billy, recalling Alf Dawkins with his crutches and his nervous tick, begging for half-crowns, it seemed more a case of how quickly people forgot.

I can tell I'm getting older, because I find myself using words like "spacious," "roomy," and "comfortable" when I'm buying underwear.

Crises and deadlocks, when they occur, have at least this advantage that they force us to think. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

I hated cats. I was a dog lover," Des says with a shrug. "What's the point of a cat? They're not affectionate. But that's because it's not my cat. I mean, your wife wouldn't jump on my lap. That's because she's your wife, not mine. Until you have your own cat, you really don't understand.

Stella couldn't help but feel she'd diminished him too—regulating him to nothing more than a good time. But his being there, his love and concern—his ability to encourage her alternative thinking—had her ready to reconsider.

She shrugged. "I guess not, but at the same time, sometimes the best things are right in front of you.

Don't miss out on blessings because you can't see that.

guess rich folks can have some ghetto drama, too, because that was too much. But if I had to choose between rich-ghetto drama and poor-ghetto drama, I'm going with rich every time. At least I can buy some retail therapy to help me through my issues.

Change your perspective. It could change your life.

I can't kill myself, I thought. I'm too insignificant. I'm nothing. I'm a thumbprint on the first-floor window of a skyscraper, a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea along with millions of tons of raw sewage, a squirrel eating a nut as a car bore down on him.

Nothing is obvious in itself. Obviousness is subjective.

I had been wrong about him Tuesday when I figured that he had always been fifty years old and always would be. He had already put on at least five years, and he had shrunk. Instead of tagging him a neat little squirt I would now call him a magnified beetle.

The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off.

It would take an extremely unattractive person to think of that." --Nero Wolfe, on the plot of "Cordially Invited to Meet Death" by Rex Stout, p. 159 of 192

I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of the human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it.

No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

Well, go on. I don't answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.

I would not have believed it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant. So

War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.