Quotes About Perception

But your half-grin is the only image that comes clear. All the words lead to that

She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of herself. It is a dizzy hole of water and the rich live in tall glass houses at the edge of it.

Memories are strange things. Without being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is no water.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it's gone – its value is incontestable.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

Why you can't trust women. Even young girls. Can't know what the fuck they are thinking, can't know what they are feeling, can't know how they will surprise you except to know it won't be a surprise you will like.

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.

Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

There is something female about being dead.

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

Our great American philosopher William James has said - We have as many personalities as there are people who know us. To which I would add We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.

A female is essentially a cunt, the pure purpose of the female is cunt, but a woman, a wife, is a cunt with a mouth, a man has to reckon with. It's a sobering fact: you start off with a cunt, you wind up with mouth. You wind up with your widow-to-be.

Yet there was something gratifyingly real about being called a bitch, a whore, a blond tramp. Where so much was a dreamy haze, anything promising to be real was bracing.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.

To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.

I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others' eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.

I feel very transparent in myself. I'm more of an observer. I'm interested in what's going on. I'm not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people — but when I'm not with them I don't have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.