Quotes About Perception

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that.

fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning.?

Men could do anything, and everything they did, no matter how violent or mistaken, was viewed with humor and understanding. The sheriff would lock them up for shooting out each other's windows, or racing their pickups down the railroad tracks, or punching out the bartender over at the Rhythm Ranch, and my aunts would shrug and make sure the children were all right at home. What men did was just what men did. Some days I would grind my teeth, wishing I had been born a boy.

I had to say to her that it isn't just men, and it isn't just men "like that.

I shook my head once and caught her glance, the wise and sullen look of a not quite adolescent girl who knew too much.

I had to say to her that it isn't just men, and it isn't just men "like that." I had to talk to her about the women I had found after I left home, women who breathed out hatred as steadily as the worst man we had ever known. I had to say that the world is a bigger, meaner, more complicated place than anyone ever told us, and the tools for dealing with it are real, but we have to invent them for ourselves, make them up as we go along.

She carried her head like a lady and her body like a snake.

There were always eyes. A little tailor on his way home from a movie. A waitress in a drive-in. A butcher-boy on a bicycle. A room clerk with a wet pointed nose. A detective's wife who was alert, too alert. Whose eyes saw too much. There were always eyes but they didn't see. He had proved it.

No reason to feel nervous at night, not even at eleven thirty at night, in the heart of New York. Nothing ever happened to her kind of people; things happened to people living down those cross streets in old red bricks or old brownstones. Things threatened silver and gold dancers there in the Iridium Room across. But things didn't happen to her or anyone she knew.

He wanted to know about her. But he couldn't ask questions, not open questions. She was like him; she'd lie.

She gave him a woman smile. Not for him, for Laurel because she scorned Laurel.

So she was on her own, Kate thought, and instilled all the friendly helpfulness she could into her next question. "Excuse me, but are you the bad company young Mr. Scott has got into?

I've wed his two empty boots.' 'That you havena,' said Janet, Lady of Buccleuch, lowering her voice not at all in the presence of two hundred twittering Scott relations as they gazed after their vanishing husbands. 'They aye remember their boots. It's their empty nightgowns that get fair monotonous.

You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him.

Self-knowledge is not sold on the Rialto. And if it were, few people would buy.

Except once, long ago, over an estrangement with his wife Mariotta, Lord Culter had never been jealous of the young brother he had seen grow from babyhood. Until the moment Francis had left home at sixteen, a prisoner of war to the English, Richard knew him solely as a blond and delicate boy, interested only, it seemed, in reading and music, whose apparent fragility concealed a will of steel, and a turn of phrase which could wound like a sword-cut.

Julius rose to his feet. The towel dropped, showering cut brown hair over Monna Alessandra's elegant tiles. His hair, finely tailored, clung to a thick-boned face with slanting eyes and a blunt profile which would have looked well on a coin. Tobie, who had almost no hair, gazed at him sadly.

Age can mellow, they say.' 'They say wrong,' said Diccon Chancellor. 'I have known Mistress Philippa these two months, and I have aged while she has grown daily less mellow. Why else am I fleeing the country?

What is your principal characteristic, would you say?' 'Treacherousness,' said Danny, gloriously. 'That,' said Lymond pleasantly, 'is everyone's principal characteristic.

Acrostics in French or acrostics in Hebrew were still Greek to him.

Why do you call him M. d'Harcourt? You called Jerott Jerott.' 'I called Jerott a great deal worse than that.

So this was Richard's brother. Every line of him spoke, palimpsest-wise, with two voices. The clothes, black and rich, were vaguely slovenly; the skin sun-glazed and cracked; the fine eyes slackly lidded; the mouth insolent and self-indulgent. He returned the scrutiny without rancour.

If he is mad, I can agree with him.' 'He isn't mad,' said Jerott.