Quotes About Perception

As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.

I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.

Why is it that an insult stays with you forever, whereas love and praise passes through you like water through a sieve?

I felt as if I were watching myself from above, unable to comprehend the happiness of the people around me.

Blink, and you'll miss your treasure. Blink again, and you'll realize that the truth you thought was completely hidden, has materialized some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions.

To this day, I cannot imagine my parents ever having been in love, nor can I fathom what attracted them to each other. Although there are photographs of them together in our baby albums, I have no memories of them as a married couple.

matters less than your consciousness about that life.

THE USES OF SORROW by Mary Oliver (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it. —GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ

Any woman who thinks the way to a man's heart is through his stomach is aiming about 10 inches too high.

The world is round; it has no point.

Things could always be worse; for instance, you could be ugly and work in the Post Office.

Leventhal's last quote is the one that rolled around in my head during the hour-long drive home: "Confidence," he said, "is what you have before you understand the problem.

My visionary anger cleansing my sight.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

in every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling

Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees

The I you know isn't me, you said, truthtelling liar My roots are not my chains And I to you:   Whose hands have grown through mine?   Owl-voiced I cried then:   Who? But yours was the one, the only eye assumed Did we turn each other into liars? holding hands with each others' chains?

I do not know who I was when I did those things or who I said I was or whether I willed to feel what I had read about or who in fact was there with me or whether I knew, even then that there was doubt about these things

We did this. Conceived of each other, conceived each other in darkness which I remember as drenched in light.           I want to call this, life.