Quotes About Perception

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.

She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception of her, and love of her.

Oh, it's a terrible, cruel thing—first you're young, and that takes up such a long time you think it's forever, then suddenly you're not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there's just the one way out.

P.J. said, That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know. Right! So We're lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can't help it. Yeah. But some statements are more lies than others.

In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night--but even as you recall it, it begins to fade.

Since thirteen, she'd been preparing. She wasn't beautiful like these Bayhead Harbor girls, but it was surprising how men sometimes looked at her. More it was older men rather than guys her age, for some reason. […] There were guys - older guys - she'd yearned for so frankly you could see it in her face.

Men grow cold as girls grow old And we all lose our charms in the end. How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics!

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew.

For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.

A fear of the unknown: what was that called? Worse yet: a fear of the known.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.

Sick?--What's sick? Who is 'well'? Do you imagine, if you or I were minutely examined, we would be one hundred percent 'well'?

Always, it was claimed of her, she was strong and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love.

Thinking of such things like they'd happened years ago already and not just a few weeks back. For once life begins to accelerate it goes faster and faster.

On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky.

O.K. he's crazy. But he's a saint too. He scares me, I don't like him. He scares me. What the hell-he knows. Yeah? Why? What does he know? --Things most people'd have to die and go to Hell for, to know.

You who are non-believers rely upon us, to confirm your sense of superiority. You need to imagine us as unchanged, unchangeable.

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible.

Why is it when I'm inside this stone house I've come to love I can't remember what it looks like from the outside. And when I'm outside I can't remember what it looks like on the inside. Why is it I keep losing my way. The things in the back room taunting me. The views from the windows don't seem to mesh somehow.

So we invent reasons for the unreasonable. We are rationalists of the irrational. It

We see the shadows of things, not the things themselves . . . We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn't reveal.

No amount of denials, protestations, or defenses seemed to make any difference, in what is called the 'court' of public opinion.

If this was a flirtation — and it felt like a flirtation — it was like no other flirtation in Katya's experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?