Eve Babitz Quotes

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

The essence of sports is that while you're doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it.

The more you think about something, the more important it becomes, the more important it is to you, and the more important it will become to the audience.

I think perception is important.

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.

Amelia shows that it's not what happens in life that counts, but rather how you frame it, how you talk about it.

History is what we would make of it.

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

History is about who tells it.

When people don't understand what they're watching, a lot of what they perceive has to do with who they themselves are.

Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.

Child, you have to learn to see things in the right proportions. Learn to see great things great and small things small.

The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see.

For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?

Just because something might not have a deep philosophical meaning doesn't mean it's not important or relevant.

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.

We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.