Quotes About Perception

that I—I have not 'heard' . . . What is it?

In slow drowning waves the knowledge washed over Cressida, her professor did not think that she was so special after all. He didn't know her father Zeno. Was that it?

Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn't seen in years turning up looking all wrong.

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

She could not testify against Zachary Lundt for she could not recall with any degree of accuracy, the sequence of events of the early hours of Sunday February 14, nor even herself during that time. It was like a movie where something has gone wrong with the film, images continue to flutter past, but dim, confused, out of focus.

All that crap was like living your life with your face pressed up close against a mirror, you couldn't see your own face let alone anything surrounding it.

and if men looked at her she stiffened feeling her jaws tighten her blood beat with dread and if men did not look at her, if their glances slipped past her as if she were invisible, she felt yet a deeper dread: a conviction of not merely female but human failure.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite has passed, and is irretrievable.

I don't need to shut my eyes to go blind... When your blind time passes strangely Floating and dreamy in a way speeded up like the Time Traveler apon his machine.

F]or, living our lives, as our bodies live for us, we are not at all clockwork; we do not feel ourselves to be clockwork; each second is new to us, quicksilver and unexpected, undefined.

It had well be a dream, no one would believe me anyway.

misinterpreting her silence for a broken heart, her cynicism about men for depression, ir despondency [...]

misinterpreting her silence for a broken heart, her cynicism about men for depression, or despondency [...]

It was remarkable to Julia—(it did not hurt or offend her, but only amused her)—how Ryan's family managed to take photographs or videos of themselves that excluded her.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

Because nothing between human beings isn't uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

If some men supposed themselves free it was only because they did not understand that they were imprisoned—bars could be made of any shadowy substance, any dreamy loss of light.

For Iris has learned that to experience a thing is not to know it, or even to have the power to remember it coherently.

The writer understands how deeply mysterious the 'familiar' really is. How strangely opaque, what we've seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.

You do know, don't you, Allen, that God is a bookseller? He publishes one book-the text of suffering - over and over again. He disguises it between new boards, in different shapes and sizes, prints on varying papers, in many fonts, adds prefaces and postscripts to deceive the buyer, but it's always the same book.

you've glanced at me, and through me, dear Dr. K——, upon more than one recent occasion, no more recognizing your Angel than you would have recognized a plate heaped with food you'd devoured twenty-three years ago with a zestful appetite

If Marianne had noticed.

I am not at ease in a kitchen, which, I tend to think, is a "woman's place"—(I do not identify with "woman" if I can help it: "woman" is likely to be a sap);