Quotes About Perception

you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy-tale!

our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. Quickly you become hysterical. Consequently I can't tell whether the news coming out of my home is really as bad as it appears to be, or whether objects perceived from three thousand miles away are subject to exaggerations of size and color.

Jeder Augenblick geschieht zweifach: innen und außen, und es sind zwei unterschiedliche Geschichten.

Erskine's freckles did incredible diplomatic work for him. Howard had often wished for a similarly benign face to show the world.

We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be.

And it's 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.

Sometimes it is when we stop trying to understand or interrogate apparently 'absurd' phenomena - like the category of the 'new' in art- that we become more open to them.

But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate

She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.

They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.  Ã¢â'¬Â¢ Ã¢â'¬Â¢ Ã¢â'¬Â¢

Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble, he said, interrupting me, and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble.

This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him.

many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don't open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you've seen her at all?

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read.

She wanted to check that it was not her imagination, that she was not being unfair or undemocratic, or worse still racist (but she had read Colour Blind, a seminal leaflet from the Rainbow Coalition, she had scored well on the self-test), racist in ways that were so deeply ingrained and socially determining that they escaped her attention.

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and colour, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

Everybody's path crossed with hers at the same moment, as soon as she emerged she was uncontained by space and time, with not one path to cross but all paths—they were all hers, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, all ways were her way—and of course millions of people felt as I did.

How many times,' Samad growled, after watching his son purchase the autobiography of Malcolm X, 'is it necessary to say thank you in a single transaction? Thank you when you hand the book over, thank you when she receives it, thank you when she tells you the price, thank you when you sign the cheque, thank you when she takes it! They call it English politeness when it is simply arrogance. The only being who deserves this kind of thanks is Allah himself!

Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn't rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. Outside