Quotes About Perception

So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn't nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat's where Ah wuz's s'posed to be, but Ah couldn't recognize dat dark chile as me. So ah ast, 'where is me? Ah don't see me.' … 'Aw, aw! Ah'm colored!' Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like the rest.

It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.

I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, What is there is no me like my statue? The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships…pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her…She had found a jewel inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the market-place to sell.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

De wife she de eyes to de man's soul. How kin I see now, when I ain' gottee de eyes no mo'?

Somebody got to think for women and chillun and cows. I god, they sho don't think none theirselves… When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don't understand one.

Maybe if she had known some other way to try, she might have made his face different. But what the other way could be, she had no idea.

It's uh known fact...you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh.

For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted through the tunnel of his mouth.

It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you on a wonder. It was like seeing your sister turn into a 'gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep seeing your sister in the 'gator and the 'gator in your sister, and you'd rather not.

Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain

Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talkin to he rin rhymes.

Now they got to look into me loving Tea Cake and see whether it was done right or not! They don't know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt!

It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.

He has only heard what I felt.

Mouths don't empty themselves unless ears are sympathetic and knowing.

Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs.

Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps.

She ain't a fact and neither do she make a good story when you tell about her.

She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether.

She knew because she looked.

Then she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see