Quotes About Perception

Fox Corner - that's what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn't that be the point?' 'Really?' Hugh said doubtfully. 'It's a little whimsical, isn't it? It sounds like a children's story. The House at Fox Corner .' 'A little whimsy never hurt anyone.' 'Strictly speaking, though,' Hugh said, 'can a house be a corner? Isn't it at one?' So this is marriage, Sylvie thought.

Je suis désolé ,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness.

it had probably been a long enough life. Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else. What an odd thing existence was.

He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.

Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.

That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt .

the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.

I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather's nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.

Personally, I don't think it right to make up things about real people—although I suppose there's an argument for saying that once you're dead you're not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first-class honours, or both).

shop-bought cakes are a sign of sluttish housewifery.

Do you keep time in the same place that you save it? If so why is it always so difficult to find? It must be in a very safe place.

It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did.

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?

The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself." SYLVIE BERESFORD TODD

She... applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman...

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?

Ah, I know, Bridget said. For sure, you have the sixth sense. Mrs. Glover, wrestling with the plum pudding, snorted her disapproval. She was of the opinion that five senses were too many, let alone adding on another.

Must you always see the dark side of everything?' Julia said. 'Someone has to,' Jackson said. 'Yes, but does it have to be you?' Apparently, yes. It did.

words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

no book could ever be left in the condition you found it in because it was changed every time it was read by someone.

How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs, she said to Ursula.

It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was. You were either moved by it or you weren't.