Quotes About Perception

There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

Justice," she said. " I've heard that word. It's a cold world. I tried it out," she said, still speaking in that low voice. "I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.

Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.

that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

To say of men that they are bad is to say they are worse than we think we are, or worse than the ideal man whose image we have built up on the basis of a certain few.

Art's only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality

Hell--or Heaven--is here, now, inside.

The reality of what we really are is often times found in the small snips, way down at the bottom of things.

I have never understood why the pig is an animal whose name is used in derision. He is intelligent and kindly, often benevolent, in fact; in short, totally with it.

Objective knowledge can be learned through teachers, books, or observation of something outside of ourselves. Gnostic or noetic (an alternative spelling) knowledge is what is revealed to us or intuitively perceived as spiritually true. I think of gnosis as what we "gknow" at a soul level, it's what we know "in our bones.

One friend experienced enormous dukkha when she realized that men no longer looked at her when she walked down the street.

She had expected rich chandeliers, not these morose and fungoid lamps, and the carpet was not dense and darkly red, but was thin, and it bore upon its lugubrious puce background a vapid pattern of flaxen parallelograms.

Les mots visibles sont comme des points de repère dans l'étendu. La signification de chacun d'eux est à la fois ponctuelle et tourbillonante; le sens nait de leur rapprochement comme l'éclair du choc électrique des nuages.

The problem with women was that they were always planning some future that involved you and that you were not aware of, as if you'd signed up for a credit card without knowing it.

Somehow, television made behavior that you would go out of your way to avoid in real life into something fascinating.

He was trying to decide if she was pretty. If you had to think about it, he guessed the answer was no.

Because what were older women meant to do with themselves, besides prop up everybody else's lives and drink too much wine at book club meetings? No one, Laura was convinced, was as invisible and as easily dismissed as the tribe of women like herself, with short gray hair and glasses.

Her mother chose to martyr herself to some domestic goddess routine that everybody else in the world had wised up to long ago.

You know, your family's exactly like I imagined them. Exactly like you." "What's that supposed to mean?" "You're like the blackbirds. The blondbirds." "Very funny." "They're very nice. You always talk like they're Norwegian hillbillies or something.

I am a tourist of the emotions, visiting only the most well-worn spots. It is romantic, that is, a distortion, to imagine whole lives from the barest observation.

Not only are we subject to cognitive biases, we also frequently seek out things that reinforce them. We interpret facts through the prism of our beliefs; we read the newspapers and seek the company of people who will confirm us in those beliefs; and thus we stick obstinately to these beliefs, whether or not they are correct.

general public distrusts academic expertise as soon as it affects real-world topics