Quotes About Perspective

After a certain age, time just drizzles down upon your head like rain in the month of March: you're always surprised at how much of it can accumulate, and how fast.

If you're going to live your life based on delusions (and you are, because we all do), then why not at least select a delusion that is helpful?

you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.

Then my mother shocked me. She said, All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too. [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married...) to my father. You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place... and you have to understand how much I love your father.

When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere - wherever people are living out their lives. It's a city with a million centers.

You are still young, so you think only of your own self. You do not notice the tribulations that occur all around you, to other people. Do not protest; it is true. I am not condemning you. I was as selfish as you, when I was your age. It is the custom of the young to be selfish... But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering--no matter what you think of them and their supposed good fortune.

Let people have their opinions. More than that--let people love their opinions, just as you and I are in love with ours. But never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else's blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work. And always remember that people's judgments about you are none of your business.

You don't like it? asked Luca, who loves this stuff. I bet Gandhi never ate lamb intestines in his life, I said. He could have. No, he couldn't have, Luca. Gandhi was a vegetarian. But vegetarians CAN eat this, Luca insisted. Because intestines aren't even meat, Liz. They're just shit.

I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.

I always hated hearing old people yammering on like this when I was young. And I do what to assure you: I'm aware that many thing were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.

the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small.

Every try to take a toy away from a toddler? They don't like that, do they? They start kicking and screaming. Best way to take a toy away from a toddler is distract the kid, give him something else to play with. Instead of trying to forcefully take thoughts out of your mind, give your mind something better to play with.

longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness

art is absolutely meaningless. It is, however, also deeply meaningful.

I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others.

But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pictures of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone?

Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby.

Your art not only doesn't have to be original, in other words; it also doesn't have to be important.

Martyr says: "Life is pain." Trickster says: "Life is interesting.

At some point I had stopped being in love with him and had fallen in love with the story of him and me instead.

Four feet on the ground, a head full of foliage, looking at the world through the heart...

sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them. a

I still can't believe I lost my virginity today!" "You'll never miss it," she said. And do you know something? She was absolutely right.

Sometimes it's just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.