Quotes About Perception

You were not in control You had no visibility: maybe there was a car in front of you, maybe not.

To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.

I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.

If a rattlesnake thinks he can swallow a mouse, he probably can. Don't assume you think like a snake unless you are one.

You're going to learn if something's bad. It's not like you're going to say, 'Well, that lion was really unpleasant. I think maybe I'll come back here and see if I like it the next time.

When you're with someone, try labeling … is Jack upset? Is Jane excited? … It'll change how you hear what they're saying.

Raquel Welch, whom I've met but never kissed, once called the brain an erogenous zone.

In fact, it's not until about the age of four or five that it even occurs to children that deception is possible. There's no point in lying if everybody knows what you're thinking!

We were developing empathy and the ability to be aware of what was happening in the mind of another person. This, we realized, is the key, the fundamental ingredient without which real communication can't happen. Developing empathy and learning to recognize what the other person is thinking are both essential to good communication, and are what this book is about.

It's being so aware of the other person that, even if you have your back to them, you're observing them. It's letting everything about them affect you; not just their words, but also their tone of voice, their body language, even subtle things like where they're standing in the room or how they occupy a chair. Relating is letting all that seep into you and have an effect on how you respond to the other person.

It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.

Pooh went into a corner and tried saying 'Aha!' in that sort of voice. Sometimes it seemed to him that it did mean what Rabbit said, and sometimes it seemed to him that it didn't. "I suppose it's just practice," he thought. "I wonder if Kanga will have to practise too so as to understand it.

Well, if you listen, Piglet, you'll hear it." "How do you know I'm not listening?" Pooh couldn't answer that one, so he began to sing.

Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials -- they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think -- rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

You know what Andy Warhol's sole contribution to this country has been? He made Campbell's Soup a household word.

I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn't move me, and I tried to analyze, even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did

According to conviction, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real me than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is

Pam: I don't know what it is about me that makes people think I want to hear their problems. Maybe I smile too much. Maybe I wear too much pink. But please remember I can rip your throat out if I need to. And also know that I am not a hooker. That was a long, long time ago.

Lester starts unbuttoning Angela's blouse. She seems disconnected from what's happened. Lester pulls her blouse open, exposing her breasts.

Her face has lost its usual resolute determination; she's actually enjoying herself spontaneously, and the lack of her usual self-consciousness allows us to see just how beautiful she is.

Three hard of hearing guys are at a street corner. The first one says, 'Brrrr, it's windy!' The second one says, 'No, it's Thursday.' The third one says, 'Me too, let's get a drink.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.