Quotes About Perception

The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Fiction doesn't tell us something we don't know, it tells us something we know but don't know that we know.

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

Every man has the natural and inherent power to think what he wants to think, but it requires far more effort to do so than it does to think the thoughts which are suggested by appearances. To think according to appearance is easy; to think truth regardless of appearances is laborious, and requires the expenditure of more power than any other work man is called upon to perform. There

Any man who develops the power to perceive truth, and who can show that he always knows the right thing to do and that he can be trusted to do the right thing, will be honored and advanced.

The poet makes himself into a visionary by a long derangement of all the senses.

I no longer knew how to distinguish between the sweet light of tenderness and the blackness of sensuality

One evening I pulled Beauty down on my knees. I found her embittered and I cursed her.

I was making my living from a joke about my appearance that I didn't understand, and in a way still don't, because when I look in a mirror it doesn't seem funny to me.

For some reason, people find me funny. It's quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It's even harder to define why a person would be funny. It's a word that I can't define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.

So when people said that the music or the book or the film was "good" or "bad," I usually felt that I just didn't know what they were talking about.

He wasn't just lucky. He was someone who had the capacity to see his own luck and enjoy it. An awful lot of people who are lucky don't recognize it and make everybody else sick by complaining about their lot when everyone else knows they've had such great luck.

it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you.

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do.

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept.

We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.

Nevertheless, no fictions.

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and