Quotes About Perspective

A woman with unconventional beauty raises the hope that the viewer might be the only one to see it, that in recognizing and appreciating it, he alone has created her beauty.

God's time isn't the same as hers. God's calendar isn't the one hanging in her kitchen.

the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M—morbidity and mortality conference—will pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that.

He thinks of his loving sister, and the narrow, confined life she lived that never seemed that way to her, and how much she enriched their lives. He was her "precious baby," never aging for her, just as she never aged. Strangers might feel sorry for Baby Mol, but if they'd understood how happy she was, how fully she lived in the present, inhabiting each second, they'd have been envious.

It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

The valley below, the rock underfoot, and the mountain before him will outlast him. On the scale of this land, he is nothing; words like "shame" and "guilt" mean little here; and a reputation is no more than a fleeting blue flame, an evanescent spirit in a brandy glass.

In this upside down world, snarls are smiles, ugly is beautiful, and the crippled outwork the able bodied, but tears are the same.

Why was it one had to leave something, or have it taken away, to really appreciate it? But tonight, she's the storyteller, because he's hungry to hear every detail of her medical world, bringing his curiosity like a moth to anything that shines of new knowledge.

it is a reminder that the sweetness of life comes with bitterness.

I know you don't always understand, but let me point to the first wet drops landing on the stones, the noise like fingers drumming the skin. I can't help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He's obsessed with plane crashes. He memorizes the wrecked metal details, the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke. Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes: The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa. How people go on, and how people don't. It was almost a year before I learned that his brother was a pilot. I can't help it, I love the way men love.

But what I forgot was that it was our plan, not hers, not the one doing the dying, this was a plan for those who still had a next. See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest.

a clean honesty about our otherness that feels not like the moral but the story.

What is it to go to a We from an I ?

If you expect terrible things…then they don't surprise you, and all good things are like wonderful gifts.

Everything that God sends us is beautiful, even though we may not understand it - and we only need to give it some proper thought to see that what God gives is just sheer happiness; the suffering is what we add to it.

While they were speaking of - in their opinion - great things, around about them only little things - also in their opinion - were happening: everywhere the bushes were turning green, the brooding earth was germinating and beginning to play with her first little Spring creatures, as one might with jewels.

Don't the overwhelming majority believe that mankind is the crowning achievement of Creation, that man is better than everything, even things we haven't yet investigated? And don't those people who aren't able to escape the bonds of their own ego think that the entire Universe, even the countless worlds of outer space, is just a backdrop for this ego? And yet it might be quite different.

we don't know he's dead do we? Have we seen a body? Has anyone told us he's dead?" I didn't say anything," he protested. Then don't look at me like I'm crazy. If I'm wrong,let me be wrong , let me be crazy,

I was forced to go to a positive-thinking seminar. I couldn't stand it. So I went outside to the parking lot and let half the air out of everybody's tires. As they came out I said, "So, are your tires half-full, or half-empty?"

If you've never stared off in the distance, then your life is a shame.

In hyperinflation, a kilo of potatoes was worth, to some, more than the family silver; a side of pork more than the grand piano. A prostitute in the family was better than an infant corpse; theft was preferable to starvation; warmth was finer than honour, clothing more essential than democracy, food more needed than freedom.

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.