Quotes About Perception

Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary into what it is… a moment in time; an observed fragment of eternity.

The term disorder of the self is descriptive of a personality disorder because these patients are out of touch with themselves. They identify themselves with a facade, a false defensive self that they have developed to adapt to a world that they perceive as hostile.

Paul said it would be better for them to express their views back in Britain, because "there, people listen a bit more. In America, they hold everything against you.

After meeting John, my father took me aside and said, "The other one was better looking.

has amounted at times to a crisis of confidence in the police, especially

We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the Aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.

The small lives of women don't make for good stories. That's why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures.

I thought you'd say it might be a trap.' 'It might be trap,' he said. 'It doesn't feel like a trap.' 'Well it wouldn't, would it? Not if it was a good trap.

Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn't been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.

Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice.

It was bigger than he remembered, and much uglier. Strange, how when he lived there he had believed everything the Goggle-screens told him about the city's elegant lines, its perfect beauty. Now he saw that it was ugly; no better than any other town, just bigger; a stormfront of smoke and belching chimneys, a wave of darkness rolling towards the mountains with the white villas of High London surfing on its crest like some delicate ship. It didn't look like home.

Han log blekt, som om han egentligen aldrig sett något le men hade läst en bok om hur man gjorde.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

The closest we can come to the truth about reality is in the fictions that we create about it.

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

It is just as if some phenzy-struck person supposed himself to be grappling with an imaginary combatant, and then, having with great efforts thrown himself down, thought that it was his foe who was lying there;

People used to be funny about approaching me, but now they seem to think I'm as sane as anyone who's done what I've done in movies can be.