Quotes About Perception

How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life's passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.

But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.

What?" he asks the tree. "What? " The tree feels no need to reply.

the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law.

The sunlight's blaze doesn't threaten the yellow of a flower. We only resent what we can still hope to be.

I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices or cell phone—choose your schizophrenia.

But it's the same basic problem: What keeps us from seeing the obvious? Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull's horn. And? What does? Mostly other people.

I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was.

Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them." The only question is whether they'll talk again, before the end.

He can't remember when the Web wasn't here. That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

The trees thicken like enchanted things. Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser. Bend over to look at a sapling, and it'll put your eye out.

I've been a man who happily confuses the agreed-on for the actual. A man who has never doubted that life has a meaningful future

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

And there's only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been.

Trees know when we're close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods

But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.

Yet, soon enough, an afternoon, half an hour, a minute, half a sentence, or half a word all feel the same size. They disappear into the rhythm of no rhythm at all.

But confirmation bias will always beat out common sense.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

He can't figure out why people do what they do. His cluelessness only makes others keener to dupe him.