Quotes about Perspective

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.

The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

I got up every day thinking the sun was out there shining, and it could just as well shine on me as any other human person.

Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God's glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?

I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.

With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history's broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can't live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation.