Quotes About Perception

I suspect that what make hedonists so angry when they think about overeachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you. 8 Here is one thing that eventually struck me: March 19, 1938, a Saturday.

When she stopped short just at the lower line of the apple tress, and stood for a moment with her face lifted, I chalked one up in her favor. I had stopped my chair at the 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.

The outsider never gets over its heightened and romantic notions of the West. The West never gets over its heightened and romantic notions of itself.

This is not a journal", he wrote, "it is not notes for a novel, not a line-a-day record of the trivia my mind dredges up. Call it an attempt to understand." (Bruce) -Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Pg. 436)

You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true.

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

The driver of an automobile on a lonely road is a set of perceptions mounted in the forehead of a mechanical monster.

The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man againAnd see the sun again with an ignorant eyeAnd see it clearly in the idea of it.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last,To understand, as if to know becameThe fatality of seeing things too well.

What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

There it was, word for word,The poem that took the place of a mountain.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

God and the imagination are one.