Quotes About Perception

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.

This can't be true but I remember it.

All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older. Why's that? the girl asked. It's proportional, Leonard explained. When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.

He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.

They were moving along like that, each cupping a hold of the other. In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the beautiful and fortunate, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.

In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.)

A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.

If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.

Here's a question I still can't answer: Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice?

We realized that the version of the world [our parents] rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.

Up until recently, Milton thought of Tessie as his prim cousin. Whenever one of his friends expressed interest in her, Milton told them to give up the idea. That's honey from the icebox, he said, As Artie Shaw might have. Cold sweets don't spread.