Quotes About Perception

The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look, because you won't enjoy it.

But Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you'd seen it his way you could never go back.

Funny old thing, life, isn't it?

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

It's all devastatingly true — except the bits that are lies

Because of his aristocratic upbringing and friendly countenance, no one yet realized he was a master at reading people.

President Johnson no longer trusted Cronkite and his CBS ilk. At a March 1967 dinner party, he told reporters that CBS and NBC were "controlled by the Vietcong.

You know we got two lives, sometimes more. I don't mean like reincarnation, I mean like we have our life of innocence and then it rams right into the real life. The life where innocence is just a mirror—looks nice, reflects a lot, but it ain't the real thing. I

You are not your body.

Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

She went crazy with a calm face, justifiably so.

Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.

Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.

believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental-- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.

Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.

Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.