Quotes About Perspective

But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

Earth's atmosphere at different times in history." You can't predict the past, Dad. "You can if you don't know it yet.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

You live between three trees. One is behind you. The Lote - the tree of life for your Persian ancestors. The tree at the boundary of the seventh heaven, that none may pass. Ah, but engineers have no use for the past, do they?

Els puts his eye to a burst of stars. They cluster, a blue star nursery, spraying out new worlds. He feels like he did two years ago, when he first looked at a glowing stain of cells under the 1,000x objective and realized that life happens elsewhere, on scales that have nothing to do with him.

Nothing will be the same. The spruces answer: Nothing has ever been the same. We're all doomed, the man thinks. We have always all been doomed. But things are different this time. Yes. You're here.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape.

The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they're forced to share.

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.

You can't see what you don't understand. But what you think you already understand, you'll fail to look at.

it's easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.

The people inside these changed lives differ from us only in degree. Each of us has inhabited these baffling islands, if only briefly.

Does it bother you, to be such a destroyer of productivity?" Neelay gazes out on a patch of mountain shaved bare half a century ago. "I don't think . . . It might not be so bad, to destroy a little productivity.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible (p. 423).

And then the words that would never weaken and never go away: Can you believe where we are?

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.

No one can ever be abandoned, anywhere, ever. Fullout, four-alarm, symphonic narrative mayhem plays out all around them. She has no idea, and there's no way he can let her know. Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

Douglas Pavlick works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. 'Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

People want a better story than they get." The wild-haired sadhu leans forward so fast he almost pitches out of his wheelchair. "Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

He's reached the age when dead is the new normal.

It's sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it's a million.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: the problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.