Quotes About Perspective

The second insight about steps and stages is that from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself.

Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else. This is why in John's Gospel, Jesus Christ makes the almost boastful statement "I am the Light of the world" (John 8:12). Jesus Christ is the amalgam of matter and spirit put together in one place, so we ourselves can put it together in all places, and enjoy things in their fullness. It can even enable us to see as God sees, if that is not expecting too

It's not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name.

But of course everything had conspired to spoil her entrance, which only went to prove what Janine already knew: that no matter how well you planned something, God always planned better. If He was feeling stingy that day and didn't want you to have some little thing you had your heart set on, then you weren't going to get it and that was all there was to it.

So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.

Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you? Sully: Not often. Now and then.

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.

You get more misanthropic every day. - I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.

The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

David has this theory that between your mom and dad and him and you there's, like, one complete person. Your father never thinks about anybody but himself, and your mom is always thinking about other people and never herself. David thinks only about the present and you only think about the past and the future.

Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

We do not want what's good for us.

THE THING TO UNDERSTAND about your father," Lincoln's mother had once explained when he was in high school, "is that you always have a choice. You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.

Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.

wasn't in fact possible to strip life of its clutter for the simple reason that life was clutter.

The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life.

Maybe, like children, we assume ourselves to be of central importance, and we're not. Maybe the inequities that consume us here on earth aren't really the issue.

she'd come to believe life was like that: you could enjoy almost anything if you gave it enough time.

This would be especially true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote.

Richard Russo

Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?

But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done.