Quotes About Perception

Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.

She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.

He said, if you allow yourself to be enchanted by the beauty to be seen in even ordinary things, then all things proved to be extraordinary.

But of course we don't notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.

The line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people's litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction.

A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.

To understand the universe, our world, and all life in the world, you have to step out of time, which for living humanity is not an option, because we are a part of this painting, characters within it, able to perceive it only as a continuing series of events, episodes. However, because we are conscious creatures with the gift of reason, we can seek and learn and extrapolate from what we learn, and conceive the truth.

They never learn. The smarter they are, the dumber they get.

Lots of people are unable to see all kinds of truths right in front of their eyes. The world is what we make it, and our future is ours to shape.

Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be. People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks. Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring.

I stopped keeping an eye out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve because, when I was five, my mother told me that Santa was a wicked pervert who would cut off my peepee with a pair of scissors...if I didn't stop chattering about him, he would be certain to put me on his list and look me up. Christmas was never the same after that, but at least I still have my peepee.

on a subconscious level we're aware that time isn't enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.

she'd known that being a victim was often a choice people made.

Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood - Addison Goodheart pg. 84

By their subtle reversal of all images, mirrors seemed to be windows to another world in opposistion to this one, a world where everything appeared familiar but was infact profoundly different

Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals

Do you see the invisible spirals on the margins of the page? I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out

English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.

I couldn't bear to have yet another French speaker guffawing at my name, so when the man on the phone asked, "Can I 'ave your name?" I said, "I am who I am." Half an hour later two pizzas arrived for "Ian Hoolihan".

Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?

Hay una gran recompensa para el ojo que observa y el oído que escucha.

These people walk by a window deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, Business as usual But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story.

The cruelty of children comes as news to no one.

Por qué tolerar la oscuridad? Todo ya está aquí y está claro si sabemos mirar con la atención debida.