Quotes About Perception

A woman in her sixth decade, dressed in everyday drab, is more invisible than a librarian.

Betty and Shirley looked doubtfully at the pale figure of Edith in the stark hospital bed. She didn't look like someone who was intending to improve. They had expected tubes and fluids and other unpleasant things, but Edith was unadorned by anything medical and looked as though she was awaiting the embalmer.

who is to say which of these is real and which a fiction? In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

other. I managed to read one that said. 'What's a superego?' Written down, it looked very odd, like a sauce for spaghetti or a musical tempo mark – spiritoso, sforzando, superego. My headache was growing worse. I wished I had an Anadin (a rather poetic cry of pain). I was too tired to concentrate.

But then, what constituted real? Wasn't everything, even this life itself, just a game of deception?

He smelled of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, So, I hear you tried to kill your maid? (Oh, that's why I'm here, Ursula thought.)

Sometimes," Perry said, "saying nothing can be your strongest weapon.") Juliet, and perhaps Juliet alone, had begun to sense Godfrey's impatience. She had learned to read between the lines. But wasn't that where the most important things were said?

There was some kind of celebrity reality show on. She didn't know who any of the "celebrities" were and there didn't seem to be anything real about the predicaments they found themselves in.

Angus had a pretty normal childhood. Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.

Don't let your imagination run away with you..." But why would you not when the reality was so awful?

Melanie was Irish, and this made everything she said sound nice even when it wasn't.

You can't have it both ways," one of her girlfriends said. "Tough and tender, men are like steaks, it's one or the other." Tough and tender, a contradiction in terms, Hegelian synthesis.

What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

I, of course, am considered mad, bad and dangerous to know.

As an exercise, can you recall the last time you saw someone whose gender was ambiguous? Was this person attractive to you? And if you knew they called themselves neither a man nor a woman, what would it make you if you're attracted to that person? And if you were to kiss? Make love? What would you be?

trivial. But consider a list of items that differentiate females from males. There are none that always and without exception are true of only one gender. —Kessler and McKenna, Gender: An

Isn't it amazing the lengths we'll go to in order to maintain the illusion that there are only two genders, and that these genders must remain separate?

The differences in the way men and women are treated are real. And the fact is this difference in treatment has no basis in the differences between men and women. I was the same person, and I was treated entirely differently. I got real interested in feminist theory--real fast.

Experience can't be reduced to a 4x6 inch still, her mother says. People stick their loves in cellophane prisons. They incarcerate images. Then they put these cemeteries on coffee tables. They're mockeries.

Holy Abercrombie catalog , Megan thought.

You can't make people listen to you. People only hear what they want to hear.

Boys do tell you how they really feel. I think you just have to be in the right place at the right time or maybe be the right person

one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul

At a very early period she had apprehended the instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.