Quotes About Perception

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward - or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist.

It was her own capacity for story telling that made her see her own hand in what happened around her.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist.

And saying you love him is the same as saying you don't want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,' she said, 'you would find out.

I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children are often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account.

sea lo que sea lo que queramos pensar de nosotros mismos, no somos sino el resultado del trato que hemos recibido por parte de los demás.

a saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it.

We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same.

he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it.

I don't know,' I said. 'I don't think I know how to be a woman. I believe that no one ever showed me.' 'It isn't a question of showing,' he said. 'It's a question of being permitted.

Supongo, añadí, que esa es una definición del amor, creer en algo que solo dos personas pueden ver.

My husband Tony sometimes says to me that I underestimate my own power, and I wonder whether that makes living more hazardous for me than for other people, the way it's dangerous for those who lack the ability to feel pain.

so for most people the act of reading symbolised intelligence, quite possibly because in that formative time they had not enjoyed or understood the books that they were obliged to read.

More than anything,' he said, 'people dislike being made to feel stupid, and if you arouse those feelings, you do so at your own cost.

although I've noticed that the people who love children the most often respect them the least.

So much power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion.

Seu antagonismo tinha a medida exata da sua antiga harmonia, mas enquanto a harmonia havia sido atemporal, sem peso, o antagonismo ocupava espaço e tempo.

He had grown more animated while he spoke, and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur. I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.

É como passar em frente a uma casa onde se morou: o fato de ela ainda existir, tão concreta, faz tudo o que aconteceu desde então parecer de algum modo imaterial.

It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: if she no longer recognised him, then who was he?

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living.