Quotes About Perception

Freda had overheard Cissy telling Gladys that Freda was "a show-off brat." She had been wounded by her sister's judgement on her character. I am not a brat, merely unusually confident, she thought

Freda knew that she could tell Cissy about Mr. Birdwhistle's lewd approaches, but she was used to being blamed for the bad behaviour of others and suspected it would be no different in the case of the octopus's wandering tentacles.

She made 'pig' sound like a much worse word than it was. Pigs were quite nice.

But when you split someone's head open it smelled like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.

He had seemed fierce and noble but in the end he was as disappointing as everyone else.

You have an eye," Miss Gillies told her. I have two, she thought.)

Women, he sneered, what are they good for? Laundry and fucking. Ramsay wondered if Gerrit had actually met Nellie. His mother seemed good for neither of those activities, but then Nellie wasn't really a woman, she was an element, like iron.

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was—wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? Philosophers "came to grips" with this problem a long time ago, Dr.

The world inside his head was so much better than the world outside his head.

I had an idea of him,' Ursula said, 'but the idea wasn't him. Perhaps I wanted to fall in love.

suspected everyone did—from Winnie, the least pulchritudinous

a group of mostly middle-aged people (Scots, by their pallor) doing tai chi—Jackson didn't get tai chi, it looked okay on television when you saw people doing it in China, but in Scotland it looked, let's face it, arsy.

Their parts were fixed—Graham was the villain, Ewan took the role of worthy leading man, Nick was his long-suffering sidekick, and Emily was forever the adolescent ingenue, the moody daughter whose life had been blighted by everyone else (apparently). Gloria herself was offstage, playing the woman in the kitchen.

Tobias was more camp than a Scout jamboree.

Had anyone ever entertained the possibility that Sylvia was schizophrenic? If God spoke to Amelia she would presume she had gone insane.

The purpose of Art,' his mother, Sylvie, said – instructed even – 'is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.

Amelia thought the word "boyfriend" sounded ridiculous when it was applied to a forty-five-year-old woman. When it was applied to herself.

Gloria watched as Terry lumbered down the path. He reminded her a little of King Kong, but less friendly.

I always thought the girl in that picture had the look of a frog about her," Nancy said, thinking, I look enigmatic because I'm dying. "Isn't

You couldn't necessarily judge a woman by the man she slept with. (Or could you?) Eva

Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. ("The clowns are the dangerous ones," Perry said.)

Ursula had grown rather callous about George Glover's lungs, she had heard so much of them that they seemed to have a life of their own, rather like Sylvie's mother's lungs, organs that seemed to have more character than their owner.

Astonishing things happen all the time," Jackson said. "We just don't notice.

He was Irish, which always helped. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't.