Quotes About Perception

Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.

But sometimes things are said and they're not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

But what reality was ever made by realists?

In Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn't expect to end up with the chicken.

They felt their own judgements absolute and the judgements of others idiocy or wickedness deserving the worst punishment. It was as if everyone had to believe their own story—any story, really—because if they stopped believing there would only be reality left to deal with. No one doubted, or was unsure; every individual was infallible because it was their truth, and so there could be no truth and the world was wrong.

Maybe he doesn't really think it now. But sometimes things are said and they're not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence.

And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.

panegyrics of a man they had never understood

I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.

Ulysses'. No one reads him anymore. No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.

Because not to fear was to imagine a world beyond experience. And that was too much for anybody.

His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.

The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn't music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams.

He...discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position...

He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings.

Really, the new hand felt normal, no different from her old hand. It was impossible to say why she felt so oddly about it, thought Anna. It was her hand, after all. Except somehow, looking at it, in a way she had no words to describe, it no longer was.

auger-eyed woman's small stout form, outlining her

Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.

She always preferred strong lies to weak truths

So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know.

I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn't any of those things.

There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?