Quotes About Perception

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils.

Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque.

Whereas some people's attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn't, Mrs. Whiting's implied that she knew everything you didn't. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.

For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.

There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn't understand something.

Still, Yolanda appreciated the fact that her meds allowed her to go among other people, who would treat her, when she was medicated, much like they would treat any other big-boned, over-weight girl with straight, mouse-brown hair, who lumbered across floors so heavily that objects rattled and the surfaces of liquid in glasses boiled. It was a relief not to be viewed as someone with special problems.

The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life.

Outside of a dog," Teddy said, wiggling his eyebrows and puffing on an imaginary Groucho cigar, a whole other Marx than the one Mickey alluded to, "a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

What made the contest between fate and free will so lopsided was that human beings invariably mistook one for the other, hurling themselves furiously against that which is fixed and immutable while ignoring the very things over which

Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?

Humour is a poor substitution for accuracy, and a poorer proxy for truth

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.

Why did people say things like that about him, Randall wondered. It was as if someone had started a rumor when he was a baby and by now everybody had heard it. He never seemed strange to himself, despite the conventional wisdom.

Who are you talking to?" "This goose," I assure him. And in fact he looks relieved. "I was afraid you were talking to yourself.

He often did offend women without meaning to or even knowing how he'd managed.

They got their own name in French," she reminded Miss Beryl, stealthily exchanging her soiled cloth napkin for a fresh one at an adjacent table. "Escargot." There's also a word in English, Miss Beryl had pointed out. Snail. Probably horse doo had a name in French also, but that didn't mean God intended for you to eat it.

Randall continued to hear the fundamental insincerity of the man, but also knew that the most effective lies were those liberally laced with truth. The lie could be ninety-nine parts truth to one part falsehood, the one tarnished part mingling with the pure until it was all tainted, more false than pure fabrication.

everybody romanticized old people, seeing in them their own lost parents and grandparents, most of whom had bequeathed to their children the usual legacy of guilt, along with the gift of selective recollection.

It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn't much better.

A man could be surrounded by poetry readings and not know it.

Miss Beryl was not unaware of Mr. Wirfly's shortcomings, but she steadfastly maintained that he was not so much incompetent as unambitious, a character trait almost impossible to find in a lawyer.

More painful than her naivete is the fact that she doesn't believe herself to be naive. Should you make the mistake of asking her why she's doing something so stupid, she'll explain it to you.

When you tossed pebbles down from the embankment, they believed in God. One