Quotes About Perception

Me mam, bless her soul, tol' me tha' was the worst thing ye could be to a man—convenient.

A normal human being… does not exist.

Over the years I've come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we've done and more to do with who they are.

But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.

He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.

We all have a sense of level. It may not be based on class exactly anymore, but we still have a sense of what we're entitled to. People pick partners who are nearly their equal in looks. The pretty marry the pretty, the ugly the ugly. To the detriment of the breed.

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.

An attack on SeaWorld might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.

We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies

the happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.

I'm seeing so much of America today," Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him — whenever things were not to his liking, he'd say that — I'm seeing so much of America today.

He didn't believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn't much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.

Here is my objection to submarines and space travel: not enough windows. What difference does it make if you're in outer space or underwater, or wherever, if you can't feel, or hear, or see or smell it?

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.

Maybe friendship was not as big a deal as I'd thought and I actually had lots of friends.

Reading Austen is a frickin' mine field.

in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees

I DIDN'T KNOW what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at the very same time, I recognized everything about her. My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip. As if I were looking in a mirror.

You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they're frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just barely stop yourself from saying so.

This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.

I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology.