Quotes About Perception

knowledge can numb as well as awaken feeling.

Crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering.

Saying this upset some men. Many among that curious gender are easy to upset, and when they are upset they don't know it. They just think you're wrong and sometimes also evil.

Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it's easy to see what we want to see.

There are people for whom there is only one sun in the sky or darkness, and there are those who live in a night filled with stars

Opposition is often illusory.

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.

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.

The military and National Guard were deployed to prevent things that often existed largely in their imagination.

I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him.

The great skill in lying is not lying, you'd say. Just leaving things out. Keeping everything as close to the actual truth as possible. Nothing overblown.

Shep claimed eating cake like that so early in the morning was a 'whore's breakfast.' The rest of them didn't care. They were happy little whores who didn't worry about saving a morsel.

Say there is no truth. Say there are only scraps that we feebly try to sew togethr.

I live in an ocean of smell…

She leaned down and smelled the skin at Connor's shoulders right at the spots where, as Martha Graham might have said, his own wings might have been attached.

Those eagles, like angels, don't distinguish between work and play. To them, it is all one and the same.

far as I knew. Never thought one way or the other when Mama used to take her "naps" in the middle of Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. Never said to myself, Mama's not napping, she's passed-out drunk. Never even questioned

I was stupefied. Had she once been a star and her bright burning had dimmed? Maybe because she had us? Or had Mama

I was near, even though she couldn't see me. But then I'm always expecting too much from the girl, wanting her to know things she can't

at that picture, you would think that no one died. You would think we were happy all the time: my mother, my baby, and

Sidda looked like she could not have been born from my body. This was the first time I ever felt that she was not me: that she was someone else. I didn't like that feeling.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. (pg. 174)

She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, but she was wonderful at catching the ball of her own mood in mid-air.

Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.