Quotes About Perception

We know our lives are chaotic, but we insist that everything happen in an orderly way and be logically conceived.

There were innumerable selves that he evoked in her.

May God keep the beautiful women safe from people with wild imagination.

In this colored world of television, gardening was the white cane of a blind man. By changing the channel he could change himself.

Facing the cameras with their unsensing triple lenses pointed at him like snouts, Chance became only an image for millions of real people. They would never know how real he was, since his thinking could not be televised. And to him, the viewers existed only as projections of his own thought, as images. He would never know how real they were, since he had never met them and did not know what they thought.

Of all the manifold things there were in all the world—trees, grass, flowers, telephones, radios, elevators—only TV constantly held up a mirror to its own neither solid nor fluid face.

Every waitress had a group of guys who mistook professional courtesy for a personal relationship. She'd never liked it, but she'd thought she understood it. As far as she could tell, men didn't have close friendships, not like women did, but they still had that human need for connection. Every movie and TV show and magazine article told them it was their job to go out and grab what they wanted at the same time it told them that women were theirs for the taking.

I hadn't meant to tell her the last bit. Sometimes Mom was fine taking in that much information. But then there were the other times. I could see her tumblers working. Her face had gone slack. The back of my neck grew cold waiting to see which version was going to erupt. But finally, happily, the correct words dropped into place, and out rolled a perfectly normal sentence. "Wonderful! Your dad and I will come see you girls play." Did she know she was lying?

His accent was coarse, pure backcountry Minnesotan. If he had to string together more than five words, we'd hear the "I seen it" and "can you borrow me some" that my parents said were the signs of ignorance

my heartbeat woke me with its thudding cry of look look look.

The truth is there's always a hidden world under the one we initially perceive, but grasping its nature can be inconvenient, unsettling even dangerous.

Belief is a powerful lens; it can shape the world world to it.

He was putting on a show for us, that much was clear, but why were we all watching it?

Mom had gotten herself so gorgeous she nearly broke the mirror

In walked a woman whose attitude was certainly in its fifties if she was not.

The woman rolled her eyes so loud I could hear it.

In my experience, the more aggressive a woman is, the less guilty she seems. Or maybe it's the guiltier an aggressive woman is, the less rational she becomes. That's a hard thing to judge from the inside.

According to my dad, there were three perfect smells in this world: Fresh-cut grass. A campfire at the edge of a redwood forest. The jubilance of rich black dirt after a thunderstorm.

Boys don't know how to be uncomfortable in their bodies, I realized, even the ones who don't look great. It's not that they can't be shy, or sad, or scared, just like girls. It's that they haven't been taught their bodies are bad their whole lives, like we are.

Claude's father was one of those guys who thought if you didn't laugh, it was because you hadn't heard the joke clearly enough.

He laughed, but his face was unreadable as he looked at her titles. "Ah, a collection from Sir Walter Scott. Very nice, I've always liked his poetry. Sense and Sensibility, but surely you have read this one." She nodded after a moment. "Y-Yes. It is one of my favorites. I only rather liked this binding." He held his gaze on her for a moment and then nodded.

The Kiowa didn't scalp, and the real Mescalero did not live in pueblos, but factual accuracy, for May, was something that happened to other writers).

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.

And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.