Quotes About Perception

Not randomly, though. Farder Coram was a chess player, and he knew how chess players looked at a game in play. An expert player seemed to see lines of force and influence on the board, and looked along the important lines and ignored the weak ones; and Lyra's eyes moved the same way, according to some similar magnetic field that she could see and he couldn't.

Or had she imagined it, and was her imagination just a spindrift of falsity?

He's saying that everything you know is going to change. Things that you are familiar with will become strange and alien, and things you have never imagined will become normal.

Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth. —William Blake

She was not beautiful—she would never be that, nor pretty, nor conventionally attractive…

Anything that was associated with human workmanship and human thought was surrounded by Shadows.…

She felt light-headed, as if part of her were somewhere else and dreaming of this, and she'd wake up soon and find everything normal.

Oh, but my dream , Will – I can't tell you how strange it was! It was like when I read the alethiometer, all that clearness and understanding going so deep you can't see the bottom, but clear all the way down.

Maybe it means nothing. It just is. Everything means something, Lyra said severely. We just have to find out how to read it.

But some time during the next few months, Will realized slowly and unwillingly that those enemies of his mother's were not in the world out there, but in her mind. That made them no less real, no less frightening and dangerous; it just meant he had to protect her even more carefully.

The wonder was in her, and the skepticism was in the world, and the coolness was in both.

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.

May I ask a question? Without the books of symbols, how do you read it?" "I just make my mind go clear and then it's sort of like looking down into water. You got to let your eyes find the right level, because that's the only one that's in focus. Something like that," she said.

Was there only one world, after all, that spent its time dreaming of others?

JACK: I don't understand why you feel like an onion.

If you could see him," Serafina went on, "you would see a black bird with red legs and a bright yellow beak, slightly curved. A bird of the mountains." "An Alpine chough… How can you see him?" "With my eyes half-closed, I can see him. If we had time, I could teach you to see him, too, and to see the dæmons of others in your world. It's strange for us to think you can't see them.

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.

One hears all sorts of things. The question is whether they matter.

What were these mysteries? Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

Witches and their dæmons felt no cold, but they were aware that other humans did.

She watched it calmly, content not to know at first but to know that a meaning was coming, and then it began to clear. She let it dance on until it was certain.

He couldn't possibly have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly as he knew that fire burned and kindness was good.

in a little adventure that had culminated in her thinking that everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe had seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked.

and coming from the walls all around was a slight humming sound, almost too low to hear, the sort of sound you had to get used to or go mad.