Quotes About Perception

All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.

She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate.

I know this doesn't make sense, but if we ever did this before, exactly this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn't the food even better? I mean, a lot better?

Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything.

Everything here is a lie, Rose said. Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened. Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand.

In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature but he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant.

Evil is a convenient fiction.

Night came down around them, and the windows gave them back their faces, blurred into generalities.

people who thought he was God yesterday morning, did a 360-degree turn twelve hours later.

It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.

Despite all this talk about imagination, we are implacably real.

Shapeshifting in folklore is clearly connected with hallucination in morbid psychology.

A story or novel is a kind of map because, like a map, it is not a world, but it evokes one (or at least one, for each reader.

The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.

How we see depends, in part, on what we want to see.

Every map intends not simply to serve us but to influence us.

We compile mental maps that are wildly skewed, a mental atlas so large and complex that we can never fully convey it to anyone else. Then we live in the world those maps create.

We need to keep in mind the distinction between realism and reality. To confuse the two is to lose sight of the difference between art and life.

The desire to replicate the—or a—viewer's view is realism's reason for being.

Our descriptions are an acknowledgment of our unspoken agreement with the reader that we are not simply telling a tale but evoking an imaginary world.

We are bombarded with the pellmell religious convictions of footballers, pop-singers, actors playing new parts for old money, politicians and the rest, moral perverts all, masquerading as mixed up souls who get the message in time.

You think a thing has more value simply because it belongs to you. Experts called behavioral economists have noted an issue they call the endowment effect, Dr. Tolin says. Merely owning an item causes you to exaggerate its value, or "endow" it with more worth.

Of course, old man, I only saw the kid once, and then only for a moment, but - but it was an ugly sort of kid, wasn't it, if I remember rightly?' 'As ugly as that? ' I looked again, and honesty compelled me to be frank. 'I don't see how it could have been, old chap.

He couldn't have fallen in love with her in a couple of hours. Why not? I fell in love with her in a couple of minutes. I worshipped her immediately we met, the popeyed little excrescence.