Quotes About Perception

Thinking: The world is. It just is.

intampina cu un zambet aproape tot ce spuneau ceilalti, in parte fiindca, in tinerete, descoperise ca asta ii usura drumul in viata, in parte fiindca era o masca, iar el gasea o mare placere in a-i insela pe ceilalti, castigandu-le increderea, convingandu-i ca n-au de ce sa se teama de el. Ca si tiganii, folosea mai multe masti: a vorbirii, a comportamentului, a personalitatii. Pentru ca, pe dedesubt, sa ramana el insusi.

he understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something - anything - other than what was happening in front of him. 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.

Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed.

I don't look in mirrors anymore. It's cheaper than surgery.

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.

Against these forces -- an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving -- time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.

Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.

It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.

It's odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It's so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts.

Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.

to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.

Men are a strange breed.

Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.

We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

I believe in what you see being most of what there is, as I've taught my students, and that life's passed along to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that's the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent.

Tony Lamas and fitted polo shirt. And that growing sense

My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything—a marriage, a conversation, a government—as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)

Though I thought if you grew up in a place with such a strange name—including Saskatchewan (a name I'd rarely heard before)—then you'd always feel strange about yourself.

You could call it the one big box, outside which there isn't another box.