Quotes About Perspective

People can't hear anything except when it's nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don't mean it, or don't know anything anyway, or it's not true, or it's against religion, or it's not what they are used to reading in the newspapers...

The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday—oh

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.

If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behavior.

It's crazy isn't it? She shook her head. You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful. She shook her head again. It's crazy.

the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Leslie called them Judy and Bill, which bothered Jess more than he wanted it to. It was none of his business what Leslie called her parents. But he just couldn't get used to it.

I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

Ain't no one ever told you yet? I recon I thought you've all figured out. - What? - That all this stuff about happy-endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death.

Well, I've never been to a church before. It would be a new experience for me." He went back to work. "You'd hate it." "Why?" "It's boring.

She looked at him as if she were going to argue, then seemed to change her mind. "It's crazy, isn't it?" She shook her head. "You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful." She shook her head again. "It's crazy.

It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood any more than the safe at the Millsburg First National was sitting around begging him to crack it.

The moral, of course, is that you must always try to see other people's Point of View before you criticize anybody. Histories are crammed full of unkind things, silly things, and untrue things—why? Because so often the people who write them will not try to see or feel any Point of View but their own...So mind that you always look out for the Point of View and help people to see yours, too, if you want them to understand you.

He thought later how peculiar it was that here was probably the biggest thing in his life, and he had shrugged it off as nothing.

The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

was appalled that I was heading across the world for four years, asked me: "How could you do this to your mother?" "Well," I answered, "she did it to her mother." But when my parents went to China it was different.

You're different from everyone else. All the rules and emotions and obligations that guide most of us through life—they're invisible to us. They're natural, like breathing. But they're visible to you.

The minute you see yourself you're forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other peoples stories. A mirror gives you perspective.

As I turn and walk toward Murray Hill and home and purring Phoebe, I suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

this, they've never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don't count anymore. I think it's small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth.

Like many parents in middle age, he's quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.

I've learned that everything that thinks and feels," she said, "grows by subtraction. Detachment brings perspective. Wisdom comes from letting go. It's true for humans, too, but most of them seem to struggle with it.