Quotes About Perspective

If they are bizarre, if they don't fit our reality-tunnel, and if they go away quickly, we are happy to dismiss them as only appearances, or as misperceptions.

In San Francisco I read a review of John Huston's recent movie, Victory, which described it as exciting. In the Irish Tribune yesterday I read another review which described it as dull. Is the excitement or dullness in the movie, or was it in the nervous systems of the reviewers?

What is tuned-in by Mr. A may not be tuned-in by Ms. B, but that does not mean that either of them is crazy or perverse. It merely means that every reality-tunnel encourages us to notice some things and ignore or forget other things.

Language structures demark our reality-tunnels. I mentioned that earlier, but it needs repeating.

It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many unscientific reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or mystics, may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or mystical brain circuits.

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.

We never find out how many of the people "framed" by Quinlan actually committed the crimes for which he framed them — just as we never find out the definite position of a quantum particle, or how many Picassos we should really call Elmyrs. Post-modernism does not result from whim, but from growing evidence that we simply do not live in an Aristotelian true/false universe. As UMMO says, we live with a middle (or muddle) excluded by Aristotle.

The human mind is ingenious enough to prove or disprove any proposition, to its own satisfaction

The magician knows that in an information-overload situation, spectators only see what they came prepared to see.

None of the reality-models discussed in this chapter, however bizarre they may seem to some readers, are any more arbitrary than the official reality-model known as consensus-reality, which is a statistical average and not nearly consensual as it seems. Travel 100 miles in any direction, and the consensus begins to crumble. Travel 1000 miles and very little consensus is left . . .

EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It's one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say I love fish, and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Wilson believes that these are good guesses based on scientific probabilities, but he does not think there are any hard economic or karmic laws guaranteeing them. He recognizes that this reality-tunnel was generated by his own brain, that he is the artist who created it, and that it expresses his own hopes and desires, as well as scientific probabilities. It is, he knows, the reality-tunnel that keeps him happy, creative, busy and full of zest for life.

He doesn't think it is any crazier than anybody else's reality-tunnel, and he claims it is a lot more fun than any other.

I ain't know what it is to be a girl Mistress Grandsol. I pass straight from child to woman without even a pause for girl between. Girl is a privilege I never know.

When things are at their blackest, I say to myself, 'Cheer up, things could be worse.' And sure enough, they get worse.

The thing about monsters is, you want to kill them until you meet them, and when you meet them they don't seem monstrous, and killing them begins to seem unkind.

Get far enough away and it looks kinda pretty, don't it?" she said. "You only get order from a distance. Close up is always messy." "Yeah," I said, "but your own life is always close up. You only see other people's lives at long range.

know. I've been in classes with her. She's bright, but she's screwed up. Jesus, they're so miserable, those kids, always so goddamn unhappy about racism and sexism and imperialism and militarism and capitalism. Man, I grew up in a tarpaper house in Fayette, Mississippi, with ten other kids. We were trying to stay alive; we didn't have time to be that goddamn unhappy.

When we settled in to eat, Susan said, "So, tell me about it." "You shrinks are always so cocksure," I said. "Nice word choice," Susan said. "In the current context.

She laughed in the darkness. "Of course it is," she said. "That's the story of your life. What doesn't matter. It's how you look when you do it.

It was just a sense that in almost all my dealings with almost everyone I'd talked with, there was another story being told that I couldn't hear.

Thing about getting a place with a great view," Hawk said, "is, after you moved in and looked at the great view for a few days, you get used to it and it ain't a great view anymore. It just what you look at out your window.

I sat and looked up at the blue sky and across at the blank windows for a long time. A woman I'd once cared about had worked in anadvertising agency over there. Sometimes, when the sun came at them from a different angle, I could see through the windows across the street and watch her moving about her office. Agency was gone now. Maybe the whole building was gone, replaced by a new one. It was hard to remember.