Quotes About Perception

They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water.

Nothing is beautiful and true.

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

When you hide your face from the world, you can't see the world.

Don't you find that strange? I can't believe I never found it strange before. It's like your name, how you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for you whole life.

I think after you live it's like before you lived.

People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.

She always saw through him, as if he were just another window. She always felt that she knew everything about him that could be known. Not that he was simple, but that he was knowable, like a list of errands, like an encyclopedia.

Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max's conduit wasn't bigger than anyone else's, it was simply unclogged. What

He wrote, You're being crazy. You're going to catch a cold. I already have a cold. You are going to catch a colder. I could not believe he was making a joke. And I could not believe I laughed.

I asked her why she was getting so upset about such a small thing. She said, 'It doesn't feel small to me.

I knew that we were sharing something with our eyes, but I didn't know what, and I didn't know if it mattered.

I couldn't tell what he was feeling, because I couldn't speak the language of his feelings.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed. p. 233

Fish are divided from us by surfaces and silence.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

The floors were like marble chessboards, and the ceilings were like cakes.

It's nice to believe that when confronted with facts people will just suddenly respond to them but, in fact, most people don't really work like that.

And when she said, Father, I love you , she was neither naive nor dishonest, but the opposite: she was wise and truthful enough to lie.

And when the blush of a schoolgirl's cheeks was mistaken for the crimson of a holy man's fingers, it was the schoolgirl who was called hussy, tramp, slut.

Are they both special? He cracked up and said, Of course their pop is gonna say they're special. But objectively. What's that? Like, factually. Truthfully. The truth is I'm their pop.

He saw what they either couldn't see or couldn't allow themselves to see, and that only made him more pissed, because being less stupid than one's parents is repulsive, like taking a gulp from a glass of milk that you thought was orange juice.

At first I thought I'd walked into a tree, but then that tree became a person, who was also recovering on the ground, and then I saw that it was her and she saw that it was me...