Quotes About Perception

It was, I thought, what evil must smell like.

It's nothing I'd want for myself, but I suppose it's fine for those who prefer food and family to things of real value.

Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. "Is thems the thoughts of cows?" I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window.

Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.

It's common to be misread by people who don't know you.

I had that in my mouth ten minutes ago and now it's a private part?

How does someone undress you with his eyes when you're already undressed?" I asked. "By that point what's he looking at, your soul?

The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang.

I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, "Fuck this. I'm going to Los Angeles!" On

Hugh claims the reason I've never seen one is that I'm not perceptive enough. This is his way of telling me that I'm self-centered, suggesting that if I weren't so concerned about, for example, meeting my daily Fitbit goal, I'd realize there's a six-hundred-year-old milkmaid living in our silverware drawer.

Her people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready — so who was she to advise me on anything?

For my fifty dollars, I want to leave the doctor's office in tears, but instead I walk out feeling like a hypochondriac, which is one of the few things I'm actually not.

them. "You said it was how big?

You'd think my mother could have seen the difference between the sunny, likable her and the dark one who'd call late at night. I could hear the ice cubes in her glass rushing forth whenever she took a sip. In my youth, when she'd join my father for a drink after work—"Just one, I have to get dinner on the table"—that was a happy sound. Now it was like a trigger being cocked.

A place always looks different—worse, most often—after you've made the commitment to buy it

There's something about picking the psychic apart that I don't like. It's cynical and uninteresting.

These tabloids only want to exploit. They don't understand this woman and her life. They don't understand you, let alone someone like me. If you want my opinion, they're nothing but savages and we'd be better off without them.

Here was a person for whom the word pen had two syllables. Her people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready—so who was she to advise me on anything?

In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, "Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl.

his voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and was now being played back at a faster speed.

Watch this. 'Buenos Dios, Miguel.' A small, dark-eyed man looked up from his wood splitting, alarmed. They spook easy, Hobbs said. Yes, well, people tend to do that when you come up behind them shouting, Good God. It's just a habit, I guess.

She looked to me like a librarian is supposed to, slightly stern, with a longer-than-average neck.

At around five, I took the L home. A woman near me had a three-year-old child on her lap, a girl, who looked at me and said, "Mommy, I hate that man.

Maybe ours wasn't the house I'd have chosen had I been in charge of things. It wasn't as clean as I'd have liked. From the outside, it wasn't remarkable. We had no view, but still it was the place I held in mind, and proudly, when I thought, Home.