Quotes About Perception

But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn't, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

I often wondered about Nigel, and why things seemed so much clearer to him. Was it more, or less, intelligence; more, or less, imagination; or simply a more stable personality?

Pierdes el mundo por una mirada? Pues claro que sí. Para eso es el mundo: para perderlo en las circunstancias apropiadas.

This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

You don't paint souls, you paint bodies, and the soul shines through.

that there were some women who aren't at all mysterious, but are only made so by men's inability to understand them.

Love, he had ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown.

Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered anymore, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else?

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cliché.

And perhaps I I didn't even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.

Well, in one sense, I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically selfevident." He left one of those slight pauses in which we again wondered if he was engaged in subtle mockery or a high seriousness beyond the rest of us.

Arthur, my dear," she interrupts. "There is something I wish to talk about." He looks surprised, and slightly alarmed. If he has always valued her directness, there is a residual suspicion within him that whenever a woman says something must be talked about, it is rarely something to a man's comfort or advantage.

Nowadays, at the other end of life, I have a rule of thumb about whether or not two people are having an affair: if you think they might be, then they definitely are.

When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.

They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. Margaret's

They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

She preferred to be at the receiving end of envy than pity.

In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.

Things were just as they had been a moment before, and yet somehow the tone and substance had changed.

She wasn't sure if they meant to be hurtful or if they were just profoundly tactless.

They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright.

Lies are so complicated, she thought. And not for the first time.

Julian Thompson