Quotes About Perception

as men were smudged and stained by crying.

Corset,' Mrs. Erskine? I don't understand." Because she was trussed up in one herself, she couldn't comprehend how Ariah had escaped hers.

Yet I remember little. Or nothing. A chloroformed handkerchief, perhaps; a stinging & burning sensation afterward, when required to make water—(as Nanny called it); ah, is it not distasteful, ugly—& too trifling to be recalled.)

But oh!—this so queer sensation between my eyes, in my lower forehead—is it the third eye, of enlightenment? Opening, at last?

He knows this fact: it was a school bus. That unmistakable color of virulent high-concentrate urine.

She'd perfected a method of not-seeing which was a kind of reverse social radar.

fear in her eyes that were a damp blurred blue Patrick would afterward recall

Mrs. Erskine struck him as fierce and plain and haughty as one of those straight-backed red-haired girl-women in certain of the watercolors of Winslow Homer.

When her lover had loved her she'd been beautiful. When she'd been beautiful her lover had lover her. It was a simple proposition, a seemingly tautological proposition, yet it resisted full comprehension.

You can be on easy terms with such a man, you can see that he likes you, then by mistake you say the wrong word or make the wrong assumption and something shuts down in his face. Like an iron grating over a pawnshop window on a rundown street in Atlantic City. That abrupt.

Es curioso, siempre sabes más de lo que dices. Quiero decir, cualquier persona. Lo que dices siempre es menos de lo que sabes.

Extraño: que cuando una luz se apaga, inmediatamente después es como si nunca hubiera existido. La oscuridad lo llena todo de nuevo, por completo.

docena de relojes para indicar que el Tiempo es una broma, no existe. Sin embargo, es necesario creer.

The striking thing about self-knowledge is that it may be lacking.

Antes de que comenzara la vida del hogar. Ahora solo se oía el viento y el tictac de una docena de relojes para indicar que el Tiempo es una broma, no existe. Sin embargo, es necesario creer.

Yet, as a sympathetic biographer, shall I suggest, this outspoken young woman is not so innocent as she imagines herself?

Shreds of cloud were being blown across the moon clotted & cobwebbed like thoughts moving too fast for you to hear.

At the LaPortes' she'd bathed twice. The first time at about 4:30 AM, which she couldn't remember very clearly and the second time at 9:30 A.M. and Trisha had still been asleep in her bed or pretending to be asleep. The gentle tick-ticking of a bedside clock. Hours of that clock, hours unmoving beneath the covers of a bed not her own in a house not her own.

I could see how, the more time you spent in the man's presence, the less silly he seemed. There is a kind of erosion, a wearing away, in one's perception of foolishness, if the object of derision gives no sign that he acknowledges it.

Because Judson Andrew Mulvaney was the last born of the Mulvaney children. Because I was Babyface, Dimple, Ranger, I was the last to know everything: good news or bad, and probably there were lots of things I never knew at all.

No baby ever saved anybody's life that I ever heard

She felt everything too deeply, it was like the world was too much for her.

There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.

A lot of your problem was in your head. You see yourself screwing up, it's going to happen.