Quotes About Perception

Ever since then, whenever I go through the main hall, I detect a hint of amusement in the empress's smile.

I was a woman in a man's world. I was a Democrat in a Republican administration. I was an intellectual in a world of bureaucrats. I talked differently. This may have made me a bit like an ink blot.

Robert bowed to the inevitable. The queen's motto, 'I see all and speak nothing." was as well chosen as any motto could be. He had almost made his old mistake of confusing what Elizabeth said with what she would do.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

As your lover describes you, so you are.

She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave

I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.

Oh, how I wish I could make those who see my work feel the splendors and terrors of the night! One ought to be able to make people hear the songs, the silences, and murmurings of the air. They should feel the infinite.

If you meet a woman in a burqa, she can't reply to your smile. It's a denial of identity.

What matters in learning is not to be taught, but to wake up.

Let us see but a little at a time and see that little plainly; that is the way to acquire substantial and lasting knowledge.

All the world is young, lad, And all the trees are green; And every goose a swan, lad, And every lass a queen.

If you are silent, if I never learn one fraction more of your soul's equation/I know you.

I am always astonished at how so much writing about old movies assumes that the audience believed everything in them. Of course we didn't. We entered into the joyful conspiracy of moviegoing.

Luca feels unmoored from the boundaries of time that have always existed.

Now and again when a book moved her, when a book opened a previously undiscovered window in her mind and forever altered her perception of the world, she would add it to those secret ranks.

She's aware that she and her companions represent something to these men. They look like home. Or they look like salvation. Or they look like prey. To an halcón they might look like reward money.

From the Author's Note: In my conversations with Mexican people, I seldom heard the word American used to describe a citizen of this country – instead they use a word we don't even have in English estadounidense, United States-ian.

Luca has difficulty reconciling all the genuine kindness of strangers. It seems impossible that good people—so many good people—can exist in the same world where men shoot up whole families at birthday parties and then stand over their corpses and eat their chicken.

Now and again when a book moved her, when a book opened a previously undiscovered window in her mind and forever altered her perception of the world, she would add it to those secret ranks. Once in

makes a face that's like the opposite of rolling his eyes, where his features get really still, and he looks away from Lorenzo with his eyelids half-closed, and he just waits for the words to go away.

She learns that there are flags people use here, and those flags may be a warning or a welcome.

On the trains, a uniform seldom represents what it purports to represent.

At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings. People with the agency to make their own decisions, people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.