Quotes About Perception

Until that night Lucille had believed that people say things in anger that they do not really mean. By the time the fracas in her dining room had ended, however, she had come to believe that what people say in anger is what they really do mean, but usually have the self-control to keep to themselves.

There were many times when truth spoke to me, but I did not listen. Often it called to me, but I did not hear it. I was too busy listening to lies. Unfortunately, if you listen to lies long enough, when truth speaks you cannot hear or bear it.

Keep listening. With open ears, you will be one of the few who learn.

More than we realize, girls understand us to be saying that they must always be utterly and completely forthright. That's a problem, especially when we combine it with the cultural injunction to be agreeable. A girl can't actually accomplish both because, like any other human, every girl contains a world of complicated thoughts and feelings. She cannot possibly be simultaneously see-through and utterly pleasing to others.

girls know when they're stepping over a boundary and find it strange when adults seem not to notice.

You must work with the assumption that every teenager secretly worries that she's crazy.

researchers have found that many well-liked girls aren't considered to be popular, and that many girls who are considered to be popular aren't actually well liked.

I have tissues right where students can reach them but have noticed that girls often avoid taking one. It's as though needing to use a tissue suggests that they have totally lost control of their feelings.

People fear what they don't understand.

Pain has a flavor. The question is...what does it taste like to you?

They [Cops] were living in the media age, and in the media age, cops didn't get to fire their weapons. Cops were honored if they got themselves killed in the line of duty, but they were never suppose to draw their guns, not even in self-defense.

Raimon was amused to see that the countess Carenza grew more beautiful by the day: her expression has softened and the pouches under her eyes had disappeared. She carried herself confidently, secure in the knowledge that she was fascinating to one pair of eyes at least.

Well, that's the thing about knots, isn't it? If you don't know the trick, it's a muddled predicament. But in fact each loop of every knot is carefully placed, one end twisting into the other in a way you might not have expected. I find them rather beautiful, really.

Even in their brief time together, Nora had come to understand the difference between infatuation and love. Infatuation was weather. Love was climate.

is envy just the illusion that the problem of happiness can be solved?

Many of us grow up feeling as if we are not truly seen for who we are; we grow up feeling invisible. The act of eye-gazing galvanizes the simple but extraordinary power of being seen in a transcendent but deeply personal way.

eyes, unaware

Remember What Mama used To Say : " You Cant Tell a Book By Its Cover

People are easier to deal with if they underestimate you.

When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it's like I go back into the dream.

It's very strange, looking back, how accepting children can be of the oddest scenarios.

amazing how boring you can get away with being when you're pretty. No one seems to notice. When you're pretty everyone just assumes you must have a great life. People are so short-sighted, sometimes. People are so stupid. I have a dark past and I have dark thoughts. I do dark things and I scare myself sometimes. I wake in the middle of the night and I've twisted myself

The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence.

They weren't bad books. They were books that you didn't enjoy. It's not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a "good book" for someone.