Quotes About Perspective

What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.

If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!

Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit...

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met.

We don't need to have cancer to start to really take our life seriously and to perceive its beauty.

Statistics are information, not condemnation.

Seventeen years ago, I discovered from my own brain-scanning experiment that I had brain cancer. From the waiting room on the tenth floor of the oncology building, I remember looking down at people in the street—distant and oblivious, going about their everyday life. I had been cast out of that life, separated from its goal-oriented busyness and from its promises of joy, by the prospect of a probable early death.

In his documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore quotes a well-known twentieth-century American journalist, Upton Sinclair: "It's difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

That's when it struck me that I can't take my life as long as I can still laugh.

Anne Lamott advises, "Try not to compare your insides with other people's outsides.

But you know, I don't think I will be so scared to die. I think it's like today: the end of a vacation when you are ready to go home.

I know there is no point in haranguing him because he will just shut down, but I want to cover every angle.

You've got to wonder what Jesus was like at seventeen," Anne Lamott wrote. "They don't even talk about it in the Bible, he was apparently so awful.

The constellation of these impulses that we call love feels like a miracle. The miracles do not cancel out evil, but I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.

I go back, this time to a swankier neighborhood.

I am grateful now to have it all—even the worry and the pain.

It was so sick, I started laughing," she says. "I laughed and cried at the same time. That's when it struck me that I can't take my life as long as I can still laugh.

From them, I learned another lesson: that I can accept-in fact am relieved to accept-a world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white. There is much good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.

In a letter thanking Pamela for the chart, Jarvis wrote, "People on the yard saw what I was doing, and they looked up, too. They passed the chart around and asked questions. I looked around and saw men from one side of the yard to the other all looking up to the sky. One of the rarest spectacles I've ever seen. Then I look over at the guards in the gun towers—they were looking up, too. Everyone just looking into the sky.

in the San Francisco Bay Area, where one out of every three people seem to be a therapist of some sort. What does this say about us? Scott Peck said that the sickest and healthiest people are in therapy. Which are we?