Quotes About Perception

She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day's headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It's a version of Bela's definition, in childhood, of yesterday.

They were all like siblings, Mr. Kapasi thought as they passed a row of date trees. Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents.

This was the woman Narasimhan had married, as opposed to whatever girl from Madras his family wanted for him. Subhash wondered how his family reacted to her. He wondered if she'd ever been to India. If she had, he wondered whether she'd liked it or hated it. He could not guess from looking at her

Voor mij is het vermogen van kunst het vermogen om ons wakker te schudden, om ons diep te raken, ons te veranderen. Wat zoeken we als we een roman lezen, een film kijken, naar een muziekstuk luisteren? We zoeken iets wat ons verplaatst, iets waarvan we ons eerder niet bewust waren. We willen onszelf transformeren.

Le parole sconosciute rappresentano un abisso vertiginoso, fecondo. Un abisso che contiene tutto ciò che mi sfugge, tutto il posibile.

After I look at her I look at myself in the mirror, and yet again I resign myself to the fact that my face has always disappointed me. Every look in the mirror dismays me, that's the reason I tend to avoid them.

But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day.

I see the people who have lived here forever. They walk quickly, indifferent to the buildings. They cross the squares without stopping. I

Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.

The question has led to a realization: that while the desire to learn a new language is considered admirable, even virtuous, when it comes to writing in a new language, everything changes. Some perceive this desire as a transgression, a betrayal, a deviation.

there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

No doubt he thought: This woman owns thousands of books and yet she's unwilling to lend me even one. But I treasure this volume, and I doubt that he'd be able to appreciate a single word of it.

Mr. Kapasi had never thought of his job in such complimentary terms. To him it was a thankless occupation. He found nothing noble in interpreting people's maladies

Solitude demands a precise assessment of time, I've always understood this. It's like the money in your wallet: you have to know how much time you need to kill, how much to spend before dinner, what's left over before going to bed. But time seems different here. My walk took an hour, but to me it felt much longer.

No man wants a woman who dresses like a dishwasher.

on the surface of the Grand Canal, my writing in Italian is something impalpable. Nebulous, like the fog. I'm afraid that the bridge between me and Italian doesn't, ultimately, exist. That it will remain, at best, a chimera.

Even a novel drawn from reality, faithful to it, is not the truth, just as the image in the mirror is not a person in flesh and blood. It remains, that is, an abstraction, no matter how realistic, how close to the facts.

as they near his apartment, he leans toward the plexiglass and says to the driver, in Bengali, 'It's that one, up on the right.' The driver turns around, surprised, smiling. 'I didn't realize,' he says. 'That's okay,' Gogol says, reaching for his wallet. He tips the driver excessively and steps out of the car.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

It is this quality, the power of seeing order in apparent confusion, that has marked the work of all great men.

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.

I use about 20 different colours to retain the luminance in my work.

Part of the way that I work is to observe.

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.