Quotes About Perception

Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.

Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.

The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn't belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.

the students were asked what they do to stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds had briefly and suddenly become visible.

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it.

I'm not arguing here that women and children don't lie. Men, women, and children lie, but the latter two are not disproportionately prone to doing so, and men—a category that includes used-car salesmen, Baron von Münchhausen, and Richard Nixon—are not possessed of special veracity.

In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters.

On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.

Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.

When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: the face of the beloved blurs or fractures as one draws near for a kiss, the smooth cone of Mount Fuji becomes rough rock rising from underfoot to blot out the sky.

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't...the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

To believe him, you'd have to buy the line that Diallo took one look at his potbellied, 60-something naked body fresh out of the shower and just volunteered to go down on her knees.

We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is.

The blue fairy godmother opened the door, and asked her if she'd had a good time, and she said Yes, and No, and It was very interesting to see all the fancy clothes and the fancy plates with fancy cakes and the fancy mirrors and the fancy lights. And then she said, It was even more interesting to see lizards become footwomen and mice become horses.

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war.

If you lack words for a phenomenon, an emotion, a situation, you can't talk about it, which means that you can't come together to address it, let alone change it.

There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies.

The premise was that people were sheep, except when they were wolves, and the solution was to find out how best to herd them. But the sociologists would stand all this on its head.

And yet the experience happens anyway. Again and again I have seen people slip into this realm and light up with joy. The lack of language doesn't prevent them from experiencing it, only from grasping and making something of it.

For mothers, some mothers, my mother, daughters are division and sons are multiplication; the former reduce them, fracture them, take from them, the latter augment and enhance. My mother, who would light up at the thought that my brothers were handsome, rankled at the idea that I might be nice-looking. The queen's envy of Snow White is deadly.

But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.