Quotes About Perspective

Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.

For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not 'Are you who I think you are?' Am I who you think I am?

It's amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them.

It seemed to me that half of life's problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.

I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths.

It was like so, but wasn't.

His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They're not that hard to hear. The (other) man chuckles. We've been trying to tell you that since 1492.

What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder. And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they're seeing.

I never knew how strong a drug other people are.

They wouldn't know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.

zoomable from a hundred miles per yard clown to about ten.

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.

The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, I'm sorry. No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here's the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can't see them, even when he can't get near, even when he can't remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.

But it's the same basic problem: What keeps us from seeing the obvious? Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull's horn. And? What does? Mostly other people.

And what do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

She feeds him and sets him up with the TV. The screen is news, travel, the company of others, a reminder of the luck he'd had all life long and failed to see.

You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.

This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven't yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear. She's

You live between three trees.