Quotes About Perspective

The evil times had come of eking out, of making do. At least, my husband seemed to regard the times we had arrived at as evil, but that was because he was in the unfortunate position of having a past to compare them with. I, who had practically no past, and whose family had never fallen from glory for the reason that it had had no glory to fall from, thought the times wholly delightful; and anyhow I rather liked camphor.

It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad about.

can never see two people contradicting each other without feeling wretched. Why contradict? Why argue at all? Only one's Best-Beloved, one's Closest and Most Understanding should be contradicted and argued with. How simple to keep quiet with all the rest and agree to everything they say.

However, few marriages, he understood, were lasting successes, so that perhaps after all it didn't much matter.

All days are happy...if you let them be.

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can't believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant . But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?

Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.

Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

If you already know what your response will be before you've heard what the other person has said, you are not listening.

I hated him for not being depressed. He seemed a fool-- everyone who didn't feel like me was a fool. I alone knew the truth about life, knew that it was all a miserable downward spiral that you could either admit to or ignore, but sooner or later we were all going to die.

Depression is a very narcissistic thing, it's a self involvement that is so deep and intense that it means the sufferer cannot get out of her own head long enough to see what real good, what genuine loveliness, there is in the world around her.

Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.

I'm not crying because you're mean. I just can't imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.

He seemed a fool-everyone who didn't feel like me seems a fool.

At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24.

Our suffering is small compared to our misunderstandings with others, how they fail to give us a break, know what it's like, judge us fairly, see the world the way we do.

I tell each of them whatever it is I think they want to hear because it is the only way to guarantee that either of them will love me. Insofar as a truth existed for me, it changed depending on whether I was with my mom or my dad.

I know how taxing it is to do something even as small and brief as having a meal with a depressive. We are such irritating people, can see the dark side of everything, and our perpetual malcontentedness kind of ruins it for everybody.

My improved affect did not in any way sway me from the philosophical conviction that life, at its height and at its depth, basically sucks.

Until lions start writing down their own stories, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter." —AFRICAN PROVERB