Quotes About Perception

WITH THEM, Joe Fernwright thought, there is not life but merely a synopsis of life. We are a thread that passes through their hands; always in motion, always flowing, we slip by and are never fully grasped. The slipping away is continuous, and carries all of us with it, on and on, toward the dreadful alchemy of the tomb.

?ujte, vi sjene što živite u tami, nau?ite da svjetlo nije spas. Sretni, sretni ste vi u paklu sami koji ne vidite koliko svijet prezire vas.

Looking round the room I found there were so many false eyelashes flapping at me that I was beginning to feel a draught.

Sometimes a stupid man is only a couple of good guesses away from looking clever.

At least that was what she had told me. You never know with women. What they tell you and what they don't tell you is a very long bridge across a very wide river with all kinds of fish.

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

If you stand / there long enough the air will thicken / with dusk and dust and exhaust / and finally with / a starless dark. The day will become something / it's never been before, something for / which I have no name.

When her eyes spilled over with happiness, I saw she took your words to heart as I never could.

We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

The fact was that where Will is concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she'd known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate.

You're in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white.

You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.

You won't understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.

When she saw how they worked, not on their own but two by two, working their trunks together to tie a knot, she realized why they'd been so astonished by her hands, because of course she could tie knots on her own. At first she felt that this gave an advantage--she needed no one else-- and then she realized how it cut her off from others. Perhaps all human beings were like that.

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?

I bet you could catch bullets," she said, and threw the stick away. "How do you do that?" "By not being human," he said. "That's why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; you can understand the symbol reader.

Who are you? the woman said at last. Lyra Silver— No, where d'you come from? What are you? How do you know things like this? Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

Speaking for myself, I've always found great intelligence in a woman a highly attractive feature.

We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong... We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's—' She said breathlessly, 'Yeah! What if it's really good...

You won't understand anything about imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.