Quotes About Perception

I wouldn't need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this-- this , the growing rings of light and water and stone--would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.

She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.

Listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

It seemed to me that half of life's problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.

Isn't the point of music to move listeners? Mattison smiled. No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits. And tradition? Real composers make their own.

It was like so, but wasn't.

Life became an interruption of my description of it.

Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.

Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning. Humankind is utterly wrong about the neighbors, and no one can see it. We must repay the world for every idea, every thing we have ever stolen.

You can't see what you don't understand. But what you think you already understand, you'll fail to notice.

How would we ever know aliens? We can't even know birds.

What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder. And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they're seeing.

The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. MAY WE NOT SEE GOD?

The whole race suffered from Capgras. those birds danced like our next of kin, called and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: Imposters. at most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind.

Single biggest influence on what a body will or won't believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they'll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.

If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

The moon is a blazing telephone that anyone on Earth might call him on, simply by looking up and seeing what he sees.

that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a

They wouldn't know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

We are not...wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

zoomable from a hundred miles per yard clown to about ten.

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.