Quotes About Perception

Un figlio scopre sempre le debolezze dei propri genitori. Le percepisce prima ancora delle parole, come una prima e ultima lezione. La debolezza può essere l'unica lezione dei genitori destinata a durare nel tempo. (p. 247)

People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world.

Nothing will be the same. The spruces answer: Nothing has ever been the same. We're all doomed, the man thinks. We have always all been doomed. But things are different this time. Yes. You're here.

legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape.

La nostra vita a U. non somigliava affatto ai nostri ricordi. U. era cambiata in tutto, fuorché nei particolari. (p. 225)

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

Again, that unreachable future opened up in front of them through a crack in the air. Again, they drew near to enter it. The wilder her feelings, the more she doubted. The man's visit was brief, lucky, mad. But anything more than one illicit afternoon outside Independence Hall would be impossible. Surely he saw that.

When her eyes open again, truths rush into her head. Like Enlightenment, but without the glow.

She quoted from The Country of Surprise: "Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory.

Their fragrances alert

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

people see better what looks like them.

Some were as singable as any human tune. He counted, sensitizing to the calls that played off one another, each a solo against a mass chorus. He lost count after a dozen, unsure where to lump and where to split. Every complex riff was identifiable, although Weber could identify none. Softer, in the middle distance, he heard the shush of cars along Interstate 80 whooshing like sprung balloons.

he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.

We only see things that look like us.

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.

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 (p. 423).

A chemical semaphore passes through Nick's brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.

Public judgment is nothing but shared schizophrenia

Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms.

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. —JAMES LOVELOCK

But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.