Quotes About Perception

Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of colour?' Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit

How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.

Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn't really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do.

James Baldwin famously wrote, "If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today's peculiarities for eternal verities.

It's the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.

B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

As Nancy Frey writes of the long-distance pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, 'When pilgrims begin to walk several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world which continue over the course of the journey: they develop a changing sense of time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies and the landscape....A young German man expressed it this way: 'In the experience of walking, each step is a thought. You can't escape yourself.

I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world is broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.

To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.

Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?

One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.

Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. Or rather, without them, it turns out that we are all heroes, even if distinctly unstereotypical ones

It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.—WALLACE STEVENS, "OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS

The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view.

When you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns, but not about men

Cynicism is, first of all, a style of presenting oneself, and more than anything, cynics take pride in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both of those things.

I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.

Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing or agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free. It was a kind of collective gaslighting.