Quotes About Perception

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood. What's dead in there still looks out. It's not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there's still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking;

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses . . . what do they think?

I see,' Rick said. He felt numb. Completely. Throughout his entire body.

O que ele não sabia na época era que às vezes uma reação adequada à realidade é enlouquecer. Ouvir Gloria pedir racionalmente para morrer era inalar o contágio. Era uma armadilha de dedos chinesa, na qual, quanto mais você puxa os dedos para sair, mais apertada a armadilha fica. - valis

The hands of the artificer," Paul said, "had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves.

Maybe it's you fuckers, Fred said, who're seeing the universe backward, like in a mirror. Maybe I see it right.

Bob, you know something . . ." Luckman said at last. "I used to be the same age as everyone else." "I think so was I," Arctor said. "I don't know what did it." "Sure, Luckman," Arctor said, "you know what did it to all of us." "Well, let's not talk about it." He continued inhaling noisily, his long face sallow in the dim midday light.

We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and our time creations of our own psyche, and when these momentarily falter—like acute disturbance of middle ear. Occasionally we list eccentrically, all sense of balance gone.

A paranoiac, my friend, is a person who has gone crazy in the most intelligent, well-informed way, the world being what it is. The paranoiac believes that great secret conspiracies are afoot to destroy him.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I

We were great builders, but one day we decided to play a game. We did it voluntarily; were we such good builders that we could build a maze with a way out but which constantly changed so that, despite the way out, in effect there was no way out for us...

You would not have known,' Baynes said, 'because I do not in any physical way appear Jewish; I have had my nose altered, my large greasy pores made smaller, my skin chemically lightened, the shape of my skull changed. In short, physically I cannot be detected. ...

It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive.

36:...Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?

Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead.

Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life.

The weather is schön, so schön. But there is nothing to breathe...

Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?

Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.

Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing. Ring-ring-ring.

Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.

Sheep are funny, the Whitlock said. Now, you look at how they behave when you throw some grub over the fence to them, such as corn stalks. Why, they'll spot that from a mile away. The Whitlock chuckled. They're smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn't having read a lot of big books, or knowing long words...it's being able to spot what's to our advantage. It's got to be useful to be real smartness.

Mr. Tagomi turned to a passer-by, a thin man in rumpled suit. "What is that?" he demanded, pointing. The man grinned. "Awful, ain't it? That's the Embarcadero Freeway. A lot of people think it stinks up the view.

Where are you going? Won't you come downstairs and—be with me? There was the most shocking news on TV; Buster Friendly claims that Mercer is a fake. What do you think about that, Rick? Do you think it could be true?" "Everything is true," he said. "Everything anybody has ever thought.