Quotes About Perception

The shit is not the shit, the pigeon is the shit.

Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.

she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was.

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark. Azide Smith, How to be Both

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.

things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth. Our

But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now.

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face

I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. "You

But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see?

Time is not what it is but how it is felt...

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.

The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: 'To give them no excuse.

The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.

grass can be seen, although it is important not to

Mnóstwo zjawisk, które dziÅ› okreÅ›lamy mianem syndromów, miaÅ'o wtedy prostsze nazwy. Czasy byÅ'y prostsze. To wÅ'aÅ›nie dlatego ludzie mówiÄ… o nich stare, dobre czasy.

for the Owl there was something Infinitely Preferable About the Night. The Owl had difficulty explaining this to other birds.

That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.

time as a relative experience, different for the jogger, the lover, the tortured, the leisured. N-W

He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.

He'd turned to me, red-faced, and asked: 'If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?

hr?za se ze vÅ¡ech emocí, co jich na svÄ›tÄ› je, nejvíc vzpírá tomu, aby si ji ?lovÄ›k dokázal udržet déle než okamžik.

It's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.