Quotes About Perspective

I never knew people could be afraid of good news too. I realized that good news took you places you didn't know anything about. It changed everything as much as bad news.

The truth, we realize as we get older, is a very complicated pastiche of feelings and facts, of what can and cannot be said. It's different for everyone.

Trauma is as subjective as desire, and the meanings we attribute to experiences, as well as the context in which they occur, determine their ultimate effect on our lives.

Sober appreciation of what you have gained at so great a cost helps you feel consoled and proud. This recognition differs from the saccharine and self-obliterating exhortation to 'count your blessings' forced on many normal ones in childhood, because it is based on having enumerated your curses first.

Laughter helps us view frustrations and disappointments from new perspectives; it enables us to survive hard times, setbacks, and frustrations.

Because arguments require an expenditure of time and energy, we need to consider what is worth arguing about and what is not.

put problems into perspective—they give you a means for standing back and getting a better view of a situation

But I don't think that it's a form of family that I would be comfortable in. I've found a way to this character and this family, but I still believe that a marriage is between two people and not seven or three.

The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.

Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

C]hange your thinking, your interpretation of he world, change the way you see! To change the way you see is to change the world. (50)

I don't miss politics.

Art doesn't have to matter to a lot of people to matter a lot.

Who we think we are can be stripped away forever," I make a poof gesture, "just like that. Right now, well fed, unthreatened, we have the luxury of pretending the Donners and the Nazis and the gang-bangers are someone else, but they're not. They're us; a veil's breadth away. There are no good guys and bad guys. People are people, all the same; only the circumstances change.

Nobody likes to have their cherished beliefs dumped on, but dumping on cherished beliefs is the name of the game.

Everything is exactly as it should be, including your belief that it is not

The reason for writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin' match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can't do that while it's still in your head.

Ultimately, everything you think you know is really just something you believe.

I mean, if you view dualistic reality as a dream, which I do, no discrimination is really called for. Where do you draw the line in a dream? It's all good.

No, I don't know what it's like to be an amnesiac teenager. I do know what it's like to feel overwhelmed, or alone, or as if no one understands you or likes you. We've all been there. But the specifics of what a person feels at a certain point in their life is of course different. I just tried to use my imagination responsibly and respectfully.