Quotes About Perception

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.

In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.

They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

And, after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people's heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it.

Perhaps I'm not their dead one back, but I'm something almost better to them; an ideal shaped by their minds.

Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain.

And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh?' ... There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.

A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion.

The sun rose yellow as a lemon. The sky was round and blue. The birds looped clear water songs in the air. Will and Jim leaned from their windows. Nothing had changed. Except the look in Jim's eyes. Last night. . . said Will. Did or didn't it happen?

And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry 'Curiouser and curiouser,' and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away!

There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light.

I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly, she said. If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose-garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?

I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and -lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim's got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he's richer?

The multicolored or grey lights touching their faces, but never really touching them...

After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. // Pictures? No, they lie. You're not the picture. My dear, you're not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You're not these trunks of junk and dust. You're only you, here, now—the present you.

Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls, because they are screaming at me. I can't talk to my wife, because she listens to the walls.

If it seems I've come the long way around, perhaps I have. But I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice. When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange -- we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.

we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.)

All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there.