Quotes About Perception

The only anxiety is my imagined absence. I am never absent. I am present for you always.

Kindness is always just as visible as the cruelty you choose to see. Your eye does the beholding. I say to you, this is a beautiful world. Choose to see it so.

The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, See?

Be particularly alert to any suggestion that you have become selfish or different.

Be particularly alert to any suggestion that you have become selfish or different. (These are red-alert words for us. They are attempts to leverage us back into our old ways for the sake of someone else's comfort, not our own.)

If we let ourselves notice, writing feels collaborative. It is a dance between reality and us as an observer.

I paint not by sight but by faith. Faith gives you sight. AMOS FERGUSON

A mystery can be very simple: if I drive this road, not my usual road, what will I see? Changing a known route throws us into the now. We become refocused on the visible, visual world. Sight leads to insight.

To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information with. With our own eyes we see, and with our skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.

It's easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don't bring you oysters. (Paul Child)

I discovered that when one follows the artist's eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes.

The German birds didn't taste as good as their French cousins, nor did the frozen Dutch chickens we bought in the local supermarkets. The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.

If a tourist enters a food stall thinking he's going to be cheated, the salesman will sense this and obligingly cheat hi. But if a Frenchman senses that a visitor is delighted to be in his store, and takes a genuine interest in what is for sale, then he'll just open up like a flower.

If a tourist enters a food stall thinking he's going to be cheated, the salesman will sense this and obligingly cheat him. But if a Frenchman senses that a visitor is delighted to be in his store, and takes a genuine interest in what is for sale, then he'll just open up like a flower.

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

Before heading back up the road, she had turned for a moment toward the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water was gray wrinkled with orange. Tiger water, she called it when it looked like that. Rhino water was smooth and leaden, dull as smoke. But her favorite was polar bear water, when the moon hung low and large, as if too heavy to rise very high, and scattered great radiant patches, like ice floes, across a dark blue ocean.

There were times when he wanted to tell Greenie, outright, that her mother was not the generous, loving woman Greenie presumed her to be, but he knew better. Maybe some fortunate children were born with platinum emotional shields, protecting them from harm and keeping them, also harmlessly, oblivious.

All that spring and summer, there were times when she felt as if she had no joints or muscles, no physical means with which to move about the world.

How odd it felt to share a kitchen most mornings with a man whose face she had seen in the news, without caring, for years. She was no longer intimidated, but sometimes she saw him across the room and thought that he must be a hologram, a figment.

perch on the wall

He seems to think I'm about five, the way he's treating me.' Lizzie took the lantern and placed in on a table. 'I don't suppose you had anything to do with that, didn't you?' 'Oh no,' I said, eyes round and innocent.

Everything has its way of speaking and telling things worth knowing. Even the little grass-blades have their way of saying things as plain as words when human lips let them fall...the choice bits of wisdom...were never written down in any books.

You always get more respect when you don't have a happy ending.

You don't always have to kiss a lot of frogs to recognize a prince when you find one -Henrietta Barett