Quotes About Perception

Try to be one of the people," said Henry James, "on whom nothing is lost." As a writer I considered myself observant, but how much was lost on me! Birds may be everywhere, but they also—lucky for them—inhabit an alternate universe, invisible to most of us until we learn to look in a new way. And even after I had been shown them, aspects kept eluding me.

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

I never confused what I had with what I was.

She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be .

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.

Because sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped.

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?

It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

My insides don't match up with my outsides. -Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? -I don't know. I'm only me. -Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.

What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

Sometimes feelings are like that - not positive, not negative, just a lot.