Quotes About Perception

Erect, it had been more impressive, a novel juxtaposition of hard and soft, with its glove of silky skin that slid against the stiff, veined flesh underneath.

College didn't erase the differences between how everyone grew up, but it disguised those differences—

The trick of the Internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real… which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all.

was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.

was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

husband, Dave, my daughter, and I had moved out of Cen- ter City and into a house in Haverford that I refused to call a McMansion, even though that's exactly what it was, but I loved Ellie's pediatrician so much that 1'd never even tried to find a suburban replacement.

remembered something my father had told me, about the comments I'd gotten after my bar-fight video had come out: When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you're angry, everything looks like a target. There are a lot of angry people in the world. And these days, they're all online.

I'm not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different from much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what.

She is fifteen years old that summer, a thoughtful, book-struck girl with long-lashed hazel eyes and a long-legged body that still doesn't completely feel like her own.

plenty of them, including her beloved sorors, were the kind of blinkered, privileged, entitled assholes who'd go sailing through life, assuming that their hard work, not their privilege, was what ensured them their good jobs, good schools, nice houses, and pricy vacations. Born on third base and think they hit a triple, his mom used to say

It happened this way sometimes. We'd be having a perfectly normal conversation… or, at least, a conversation as close to normal as we could have—and then he'd say something that would remind me that nothing was normal, nothing at all.

Even if things don't get better, you can always make them look good on the Internet.

But I do know a kind of madness that lies low in the mind, half-buried in consciousness, which lives in parallel to sanity, and given the right circumstances or even just half a chance, creeps like a lick of flame or a growing tumour up and around ordinary perception, consuming it for a while, and causing one, even when not at the movies, to quake in fear of the world and people and what they--I mean, of, we--are capable of.

Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there",' I instructed. 'Also, I'd like a dove, a winged angel, an anchor and an open book, properly carved on a nice piece of granite.

Wenn man verstehen will, was einer meint oder sagt, muss man im Grunde das, was er meint oder sagt, immer schon wissen. Ist dann ein gelungener Dialog nur Wiedererkennen? Und das Verstehen nicht etwas ein Weg, sondern vielmehr ein Zustand?

You confuse me with something that is in you. I will not predict how you want to use me.

With all the holes in you already there's no reason to define the outside environment as alien.

Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech - what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was.

No, no, no. There's no such thing as cheap and cheerful. It's cheap and nasty & expensive and cheerful.

If you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning, and you think you are an onion, this is your car, (about the BMW X3).

Memory was a story you told yourself about yourself, extrapolated from a tiny dot-matrix of facts.

The moment a Frenchman opens his mouth, he declares his identity. The French speak French. The English speak a language which belongs to no one.

Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism—of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously—than they are of the crime itself.

I would like to think that what we were doing was in some way trying to help Afghans," the source explained, but the notion "that what we were part of was actually defending the homeland or in any way to the benefit of the American public" had evaporated long ago. "There's no illusion of that that exists in Afghanistan. It hasn't existed for many years.