Quotes About Perception

Don't turn the truth into a lie using self-fulfilling prophecies. RJ Intindola

Are men truly such idiots that they cannot resist two orbs of flesh?

God's Teeth,' he says. 'I was only trying to wake you. You were crying out in your sleep.' 'I was not,' I say, then look from his neck to my knife. 'When I tried to wake you, you stabbed me.' He sounds sore put out. and I cannot blame him.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't make any difference to adults how clever children are. They always stick together. Unless you are sick or dying or mortally wounded, they will always side with the other adult.

Cameras can only record what they see.

person's behaviour changes mysteriously according to circumstances. So, it is impossible for anyone to understand it. Explaining this, Chanakya says that like the Neem tree (Indian

Children's Song We live in our own world, A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge. And though you probe and pry With analytic eye, And eavesdrop all our talk With an amused look, You cannot find the centre Where we dance, where we play, Where life is still asleep Under the closed flower, Under the smooth shell Of eggs in the cupped nest That mock the faded blue Of your remoter heaven.

The politician dispenses wealth which other men have produced, and we say he is "compassionate," while the businessman who produces the wealth is dismissed as "greedy" and "materialistic.

je découvrais que les adultes n'était pas conformes à ce qu'ils disaient être. Qu'ils agissaient par rapport à la société, non par conviction profonde. C'est ce que, toute ma vie, je reprocherai aux un et aux autres: agir sans croyance.

We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play.

All that happens in the human brain is but the result of electro-chemical reactions. Be it of love, hate, of pleasure, of suffering, of imagination, or all other states of mind, sentiment or sickness; the process depends in every case on the chemical reactions produced in the interior of the brain, and the resulting electrical impulses or messages, be they visual, auditory, based on memory, or an interpretation of new events based on elements that one has in the memory.

God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.

What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

Now, please don't tell me you don't care about how you look and that there's more to you than your appearance. There are two kinds of people in this world : people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul. Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain? You think art has meaning. You think you're not like me.

Do you know the difference between an expat and an immigrant? You're an immigrant in a country you look up to, an expat in one you consider beneath you.

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

You wanted people's stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.

Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. You can assume he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character's actions, as if that's possible, as if life works that way. I've read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I'm always supposed to infer causality.

I'd dismembered it in my memories. I'd disremembered it.