Quotes About Perception

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied

She looked at him as if she were going to argue, then seemed to change her mind. "It's crazy, isn't it?" She shook her head. "You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful." She shook her head again. "It's crazy.

It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood any more than the safe at the Millsburg First National was sitting around begging him to crack it.

Parents were what they were; it was not up to you to try to puzzle them out.

Jess wouldn't argue that, but he saw her as a beautiful wild creature who had been caught for a moment in that dirty old cage of a schoolhouse, perhaps by mistake.

Whoever heard of a king who was scared of tall trees and a little bit of water?

a frightening number of whom had IQ scores in the low 70s? I stopped reading and just stuck the records out of sight in a bottom drawer of my desk, and never thought of them again until the end of the year when I was throwing away the accumulation of papers in my desk. I was furious with those scores. My kids were not dumb! I've never trusted standardized tests since.

Whenever I am tempted to dismiss the poor or uneducated for their vulgar tastes, I see the face of old Auntie Braxton, as she stands stock still in front of our picket fence, lips parted to reveal her almost toothless gums, drinking in a polonaise as though it were heavenly nourishment.

Listening to that woman was like licking melted ice cream off the carton.

You're different from everyone else. All the rules and emotions and obligations that guide most of us through life—they're invisible to us. They're natural, like breathing. But they're visible to you.

As I turn and walk toward Murray Hill and home and purring Phoebe, I suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold.

The insouciance of youth doesn't stay, but shades into "eccentricity," as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I've always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.

I compensated for my athletic deficiency with an upright bearing and an impeccable style of dress that earned me the nickname "the Count"—one bestowed with affection, as I was good-humored about my own foibles.

suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

I couldn't argue. For years, that was how I did my work at R.H. Macy's: If I understood better than you did yourself why you thought or did or wanted something, then I could control you.

Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured, but the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful.

Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize. Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.

Maybe there's a natural order in all this: New things pop up at the edges, but the middle's where the money is. I did that dance myself over the years. I got rich doing it. And now here I am, an old white lady in a fur coat on a Murray Hill sidewalk, eavesdropping on passersby, wondering what I'm missing.

By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining.

Times Square, much like these TV ads, expects little of us, if not quite the worst. Instead of treating one like an overgrown six-year-old with impulse control issues and a huge piggy bank ready for the smashing, as the ads do, it treats one like an enormous genital. A penis with a wallet, if one prefers.

Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.

thought of that image as I was looking across the table at Max, at him looking back at me, old me, much older me: fifty-six. Max was born in 1906 and thus had always been—would always be—younger than I, by six years if I lied about my age, as I always did, or by seven if I was honest, which I was only in the privacy of my mind.

Canyons of incomprehension yawn between me and most other human beings, and I keep acting as if it's possible for me to reach across and join them on their side, to span the gap between who they believe me to be and who I really am.