Quotes About Perspective

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it.

Like my father, I looked up rather more than I looked out.

he slowly put down the hamburger he was eating, stared straight into my eyes, and, without missing a beat, said rather dryly, "That explains a lot.

It was one of those still, clear moments when you realize that you haven't understood anything at all, that you have had no real comprehension of the other person's world.

But, as I well knew, an understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it.

Even in my blackest depressions, I never regretted having been born. It is true that I had wanted to die, but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born.

An understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it. And, ultimately, it is probably unreasonable to expect the kind of acceptance of it that one so desperately desires.

People say, when I complain of being less lively, less energetic, less high-spirited, "Well, now you're just like the rest of us," meaning, among other things, to be reassuring. But I compare myself with my former self, not with others.

Having heard so often, and so believably, John Donne's bell tolling softly that "Thou must die," one turns more sharply to life, with an immediacy and appreciation that would not otherwise exist.

Her version of Lowell was not theirs, even when they were discussing the same symptoms; what to her was "mad" was to them another mark of Lowell's genius.

In the hills giant oaks Fall upon their knees You can touch parts You have no right to

But sometimes the hardest things in the world to see are the ones that are right up on you.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

When you are young, there are many things which appear dull and lifeless. But as you get older, you will find these are the very things that are most important to you.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.

But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it feel this way to you?

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later...

It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things . When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things , can you?

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.

It's nonsense to believe people go on loving each other regardless of what happens.

It doesn't matter how old someone is, it's what they've experienced that counts. People can get to be a hundred and not experience a thing.

After all, there's no turning back the clock now. One can't be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.