Quotes About Perspective

I am sure I need not explain to any sensible (that is, female) reader why I woke the following morning absolutely furious with Emerson. Such are the vacillations of the human heart; and I have observed that the farther one goes in one direction, the more violent the swing in the opposite direction will be.

Men are frightful nuisances at times; how much simpler life would be if we women did not have to make allowances for their little peculiarities.

It went on raining. Day after day. Three days, to be precise. I didn't mind. At that point I'd have considered sunlight a personal insult.

It never registered to them that I had time to read all of Balzac, Dickens, and Stendhal while Papa was dying, not to mention everything in the city library after Mother's operation. It would have been exactly the same to them if I had read through all twenty-six volumes of Elsie Dinsmore. (The White Azalea)

You will have only one story," she had said. "You'll write your one story many ways. Don't ever worry about story. You have only one.

But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

All these lives, she said. All the stories we never know. (125)

It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things; possible to miss life in preparation for living.

Fortunately, though she was hungry, she didn't mind missing a meal. Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of one's time.

Her great dead friends did not seem worth reading that night. They always said the same things now—over and over again they said the same things, and nothing new was to be got out of them any more for ever. No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead. Nothing further was to be expected of them; while of the living, what might one not still expect?

But we found San Salvatore, said Mrs. Arbuthnot, and it is rather silly that Mrs. Fisher should behave as if it belonged only to her. What is rather silly, said Mrs. Wilkins with much serenity, is to mind. I can't see the least point in being in authority at the price of one's liberty.

Imagine, thought Scrap, having most of one's life at the wrong end. Imagine being old for two or three times as long as being young. Stupid, stupid.

She did not like her name. It was a mean, small name, with a kind of facetious twist, she thought, about its end like the upward curve of a pug dog's tail.

If you weren't here I wouldn't see it, said Ingram, firmly believing it in the face of the fact that nothing ever escaped his acute vision. I see all this only through you. You are my eyes. Without you I go blind, I grope about with the light gone out. You don't know what you are to me, you little shining crystal thing—you don't begin to realise it, my dear, my dear sweet Found-at-Last.

How is it that you should feel so vastly superior whenever you do not happen to enter into or understand your neighbour's thoughts when, as a matter of fact, your not being able to do so is less a sign of folly in your neighbour than of incompleteness in yourself?

Was it possible that loneliness had nothing to do with circumstances, but only with the way one met them?

I suppose you never wanted to be a woman," she said, considering this phenomenon with apparent interest. Axel laughed. "The mere question makes you laugh," she said, looking up quickly. "I never heard of a man who did want to. But lots of women would give anything to be men." "And you are one of them?" "Yes." He laughed again.

I can't any longer— I've come to the end-" The end? thought old Mrs. Bott. Which end? There were so many ends to life, and in one's younger years one was always coming to them, and then finding that they weren't ends at all.

Faced by the accomplished fact, it was really rather useless for him to mind. What was the good of minding the actual and the fininshed? ....to allow oneself to be upset because something had been done which one considers a pity, or even disastrous, is to double the misfortune. Why throw after what is already gone one's own good temper and serenity?

Was she the same person to-night as last night? Was she two persons? If she was only one, which one? Or was she a mere vessel of receptiveness, a transparent vessel into which other people poured their view of her, and she instantly reflected the exact colour of their opinion?

It seemed, however, that I had. I didn't want any more, so I got them. And now I am glad, for if, as I had sometimes wished at that time, I could have finished with a consciousness become unbearable, if, in other words, I had then died, I would never have known a great many very beautiful and delightful things. Evidently, then, it is wise not too soon to lose patience with life, but to wait and see what it may have round its next corner. I

What's the use of worrying? ...and settled down to enjoy staying where she was. Much better enjoy what you had got, when by chance you had got it, instead of wasting time worrying because you ought really to be somewhere else.