Quotes About Perception

What it requires is admitting the possible. Believing the evidence of your eyes and ears without trying to explain it all away. Accepting that you'll never be able to cross every t and dot every i. And most of all, it requires a willingness to believe that science isn't the ultimate authority. Just because something can't be rationally explained on the basis of today's science doesn't mean it isn't real.

The student asks: If my redstone necklace had every view of every veil that ever brightened, would I be wise? The master answers: If I had a thousand pieces of a priceless vase, would I be rich?

He had always thought that death was black nothingness, but he had not counted on being awake for it.

The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious.

Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water.

He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most women had both.

Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, with one skin-layer missing.

It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different.

He was low-key, I was intense; things that cut me to the quick he was able to sail by with scarcely a notice; he was slow to anger, I quick; the world registered gently upon him, sometimes not at all, whereas I was fast to feel both pleasure and pain.

Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right to be considered a "successful" suicide. This is a success one can live without.

He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port... Yet not once in the years we have been together have I doubted Richard's love for me, nor mine for him. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.

His wife maintains she can tell whether or not Jim is in the house simply by the amount of energy she feels in the air. But

Parents also seriously underestimate the extent of depression in their adolescent children.

I did not wake up one day to find myself mad. Life should be so simple.

You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

People who aren't as exuberant as you are get really irritated with you.

Her version of Lowell was not theirs, even when they were discussing the same symptoms; what to her was "mad" was to them another mark of Lowell's genius.

A too closely watched flower/blossoms the wrong color./Excess attention to the jonquil/turns it gentian. Flowers/need it tranquil to get/their hues right. Some/only open at midnight.

But sometimes the hardest things in the world to see are the ones that are right up on you.

A woman's name will always suffice, but if you'll keep your ears open in a room with men and women, you'll hear it's the call used least often.

We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.

When you are young, there are many things which appear dull and lifeless. But as you get older, you will find these are the very things that are most important to you.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.