Quotes About Perception

Por qué habría de querer yo una fotografía de tal desastre? Me acerqué un poco más a ella y vi mi cabeza, mi cabeza, allí dentro, tras la ventana de la cocina. Me hizo pensar, el verme a mí mismo de ese modo. Lo digo en serio: es algo que le hace pensar a uno.

Oía los latidos de mi corazón. Oía el corazón de los demás.

He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

Time passed again. I don't know how long. I had no watch. They don't make that kind of time in watches anyway.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.

The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.

Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.

Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them. Their color was lapis-lazuli blue and the color of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. She was too tall to be cute. She wore plenty of make-up in the right places and the cigarette she was poking at me had a built-on mouthpiece about three inches long. She didn't look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use sometime.

I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission." "I get it," I said. "I'm stupid. It sank in after a while.

That's the trouble with cops. You're all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you.

Then she laughed. It was almost a racking laugh. It shook her as the wind shakes a tree. I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something already known and it didn't fit. Then I thought that was too much to get out of a laugh.

She sighed. "All men are the same." "So are all women—after the first nine.

She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.

I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn't particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her.

There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop.

Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue youi could get better somewhere else.

The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.

There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.

I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can't tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe.

Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners of her lips, very slowly, like a child trying to pick up a snowflake.