Point Of View Quotes

“The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.”
― Brooks Atkinson

“Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had."

[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]”
― Anna Quindlen

“We begin to learn wisely when we're willing
to see world from other people's perspective.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Understanding is not absolutely final.
What's now right could be wrong later.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

“I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Pull of the Moon

“There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.”
― Louis Althusser

“Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“I believe Jesus wasn't thinking about miracle when He performed it.
He's just doing normal activities as he did in His heavenly kingdom.”
― Toba Beta

“By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

“Fanatics don't wanna see anything from another standpoints.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Smartass Disciple: Master, I’m going to change the whole world.
Master of Stupidity: It changes within you. It changes without you.”
― Toba Beta

“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle--all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe--for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.”
― Lillian Hellman

“An ant can't define shape of an elephant solely from its' point of view.
They have to unify all views. It's a way for ant to understand elephant.
In order to understand true realities, men need to do mental blending.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“My weakness consists in not having a discriminating eye for the incidental --- for the externals, --- no eye for the hod of the rag-picker or the fine linen of the next mean. Next man---that's it. I have met so many men." he pursued, with momentary sadness--- "met them too with a certain, certain impact, let us say; like this fellow, for instance--- and in each case all I could see was merely a human being. A confounded democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blindness, but has been of no advantage to me-- I can assure you. Men expect one to take into account their fine linen. But I never could get up any enthusiasm about these things. Oh! It's a failing; and then comes a soft evening; a lot of men too indolent for whist-- and a story...." [p.44]”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Mysteries are facts that haven't been formalized.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Moreover, the more deeply a view is ingrained, the less likely we will see it as influencing us—or see it at all. If you want to know what water is, don’t ask the fish.
(Kindle Locations 1550-1551)”
― Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith (to the Head): Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists

“If Brian Harvey from East 17 has lived there, it can’t be that fucking bad”
― Matthew Bracey, Steel Dogs

“Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.”
― Anne Rice

“Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn't mean people on other planets shouldn't eat something else. On some planets I'm sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwords. Then it's time to eat stones again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“Petty mindedness instructs eyes to see everything from an unappropriate standpoint, beautifulness could be looked otherwise.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“The frame, the definition, is a type of context. And context, as we said before, determines the meaning of things. There is no such thing as the view from nowhere, or from everywhere for that matter. Our point of view biases our observation, consciously and unconsciously. You cannot understand the view without the point of view.”
― Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist

“To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.”
― Orson Scott Card, Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century

“Smartass Disciple: Master, why heaven is up there and hell is down there ?
Master of Stupidity: If otherwise, it wouldn't be celebrated as ascension day.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I'll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.
Plutonium! Now there's the stuff to put hair on a microbe's chest.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“Scoundrel? We do not call Senhor Valcour that. He is faithful to the Emperor, who employs him. Shall we, who are unfaithful, blame him for his fidelity?”
― L. Frank Baum, The Fate of a Crown

“You want a problem to fix? Fix how you look at me.”
― Rachael Lippincott, Five Feet Apart