Quotes About Perception

It's the truth, even if it didn't happen... ...if they don't exist, how can a man see them?

He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.

You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes...I see...

But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

I'd see him do things that didn't fit with his face or hands, things like painting a picture at OT with real paints on a blank paper with no lines or numbers anywhere on it to tell him where to paint, or like writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. How could a man who looked like him paint pictures or write letters to people, or be upset and worried like I saw him once when he got a letter back?

They think they know the book by its cover, but the book knows what it is. Now he knew better; if the book never opens up and comes out, it can be warped to fit the image others see. . . .No, a book wasn't invulnerable to the appearance of its cover, not by any means.

you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It's still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

I can see the…seams where they're put together. And, almost, see the apparatus inside them take the words I just said and try to fit the words in here and there, this place and that, and when they find the words don't have any place ready-made where they'll fit, the machinery disposes of the words like they weren't even spoken.

She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that's weak and of the flesh.

Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier.

It's fall coming, I kept thinking, fall coming; just like that was the strangest thing ever happened. Fall. Right outside here it was spring a while back, then it was summer, and now it's fall-that's sure a curious idea.

In any given situation there will always be more dumb people than smart people. We ain't many!

I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with will-power, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest.... Nor is chronological reporting by any means always the most truthful (each camera has its own veracity) especially when, in all good faith, one cannot truthfully claim to remember what happened accurately....

The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount. That's what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for the way a man is? They didn't understand.

turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my sound soaks up all other sound.

Does one ever play Coltrane for the uninitiated without subconsciously hoping for the worst?

It's the truth. Even if it didn't happen.

Out along the dim six-o'clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so's not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box.

she followed their expert lead and laughed along—they knew the secret of black, that it could not be made blacker, and if neither could it be made lighter, it could still be made funnier.

Itt az Å'sz, járt a fejemben, itt az Å'sz. Mintha most elÅ'ször volna itt, fura dolog. ?sz. Még nem is olyan régen tavasz volt, aztán nyár, most meg Å'sz – fura csakugyan.

There is generally one person in every situation you must never underestimate the power of.

To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you.

The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and the black face and hands seem to float against it like a ghost.

And crying doesn't always mean need