Quotes About Perception

Whenever we passed the place [Dix Hill, the local state mental hospital], my sisters and I would stick our heads out the car window, expecting to hear a hysterical voice cackling, "I'm mad, I tell you, MAD!" The patient would embrace his lunacy as though it were a treasure he had discovered hidden beneath the floor-boards. "Mad! mad!

She offered to have my glasses fixed but drew the line when I asked for a brand-new pair. "But the ones I've got make me look like a bozo." "Well, of course they do," she said. "They're glasses. That's their job.

the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

Most movies and TV shows get drugs wrong. Someone takes a bong hit and spends the next few hours laughing uncontrollably. Someone takes acid and steps into the Sergeant Pepper cover. Six Feet Under gets drugs right, so after taking the mushrooms, Claire and her friend hole up in the bedroom, using the sewing machine and wishing they lived in the nineteenth century.

In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn't it often that way?

In a roomful of shouting people, the one who whispers becomes interesting.' (Peter Schimdt)

In a 1975 Playboy interview, David Bowie caused a furore when he opined that 'Hitler was the first rock star. He staged a whole country.' Oddly, Bryan Ferry would get into similar hot water in a 2007 interview with a German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag, in which he praised Nazi iconography as 'just amazing' and 'really beautiful' and was later forced to make a public statement of apology.

In a roomful of shouting people, the one who whispers becomes interesting.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid." —Jules Feiffer

as I really don't think I draw all that well, but it was interesting to see that some of the drawings worked better than others, and why.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

When will you stop laughing at misery? I'm so sick and tired of your pseudo-strength. All I want you to do is laugh at what is funny and cry at what isn't, but you won't do that, will you?

Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality.

always try to read form as content, style as meaning.

Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage.

Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular personal attribute—their race, say, or sexual orientation, or even their physical beauty—are always the writers whose work (the reception to whose work) has most directly benefited from this attribute.

The ancient Indian epic Mah?bh?rata asks, "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.

I began experimenting with visualizing the rising sun coming up in people's chests as I talked with them. It began to transform my listening.

Dev wondered if that was the job of fiction, to test-drive the impossible, to loosen our grip on conventional reality. He guessed that's probably what fiction writers would claim—if there were any left, that is.

Each a frog in its own pot of water as the temperature ticked up a degree at a time.

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.

Se equivoca; las mujeres necesitamos otra información sobre un hombre como ése. No conocemos la calidez de su voz, si conversa mirando a los ojos, si su abrazo nos hace sentir pequeñas. A una mujer no le interesa un hombre que necesita ser rescatado. Como empleado, tal vez, concluye, pero para amar a un hombre, el alma buena es lo de menos.

Era un desatino que luego de un bombardeo me llevaran cadáveres de tuberculosos o de alguien que rodó por las escaleras o de un viejo que no pudo más con su vejez o de una mujer que se quedó en el parto; eran muertos de segundo orden, pues no llevaban la aureola de víctimas, sino de meros impertinentes.

Los refranes son siempre ambivalentes, a una sentencia le corresponde su opuesta, en eso consiste la sabiduría popular, en no equivocarse nunca y lo mismo a quien madruga Dios le ayuda que no por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano.