Quotes About Perception

When you crop a photo, you tell a lie.

My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and i have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. my brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.

when future archeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of these gyms and all of this scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we are a culture obsessed with torture.

The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he will ever be.

You could return to that same hive a thousand years later and there would be just the same perception of tomorrow as never being any different. Humans are completely different. We assume tomorrow is another world.

Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now—as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.

One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness.

And that's the day I became an artist. Nobody blames an artist for noticing stuff.

Humanity actually seems to be split down the middle on the definition of luxury: those who want gilded leopard-shaped teapots and those who want to live in the white box their iPhone came in.

only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony—which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can't imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.

If life were fattening, Walter Cronkite would weigh 500 pounds.

The ultimate offense was the idea that Europeans "discovered" the New World to begin with, as if the people living here didn't exist before Europeans saw them.

When a man's ambitious, it's called drive. When a woman's ambitious, it's careerism and she's a bitch.

Given the two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon you drank, I'd say that by midshift your blood alcohol concentration must have been around 0.2 percent, leaving you in no condition to notice any disturbance, much less investigate it.

Beware the dog that does not bark, and the man who does not talk.

jennie confirmed my suspicions that television advertising is directed mainly at people with the iq of a pongid

Most detection is simple.

If this sounds like strange talk from a scientist—so be it. If there is one thing I have learned from a lifetime study of science, it is that the world is not a place we human beings will ever comprehend. Understand, yes; comprehend, no.

our brains did not evolve to help us comprehend the true meaning of things, only to understand their mechanical workings. Knowing the true meaning of reality does not contribute to one's ability to survive, and thus this kind of understanding was not addressed by evolution.

Jennie had a set of values, but she didn't realize they were different values from the rest of us. She never could understand why she was always in trouble. In the end, I mean. She didn't know what it was that made her angry all the time. I'll tell you what it was. It was very simple: it was our society trying to break her, trying to make her a nice middle-class person.

Jennie taught me just how worthless that is. Being smart. Jennie wasn't smart by human standards, but she had a set of values. Real values. You see, for Jennie, freedom was the highest value. Language gave Jennie freedom. Although I didn't know it at the time, she taught me the real meaning of the word "freedom," not the bullshit meaning you get from politicians and priests.

It is all about how human beings construct a narrative out of random events, baseless assumptions, and simple-minded prejudices.

To most people, Metcalf had discovered, silence was even more unbearable than pointed questioning.

She felt his shoulders began to convulse, faintly, regularly, almost as if he was weeping. But that was, of course, impossible, as Pendergast would never cry.