Quotes About Perception

We were happy when he first came. We first thought he came from the Light; but he comes like the dusk of the evening now, not like the dawn of the morning. He comes like a day that has passed, and night enters our future with him… Plains Chieftain, c. 1870

In the last couple of weeks I have seen the ads for the Wonder Bra. Is that really a problem in this country? Men not paying enough attention to women's breasts?

Playboy exploits sex the way Sports Illustrated exploits sports.

I always say now that I'm in my blonde years. Because since the end of my marriage, all of my girlfriends have been blonde.

The difference between Marilyn Monroe and the early Pamela Anderson is not that great. What's amazing is that the taste of American men and international tastes in terms of beauty have essentially stayed the same. Styles change, but our view of beauty stays the same.

One senses that Hegel was possible only in German, and finds it natural that Locke in a language where large and red precede apple should have arrived at the thing after sorting out its sensory qualities, whereas Descartes in a language where grosse et rouge follows pomme should have come to the attributes after the distinct idea.

Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.

Americans have never really caught on to the idea of eating sheep. I think they think it's cissy.

I was working on the principle, you see, that the more obvious you are, the less obvious you are.

I had to wonder how Ginny could hold her head up under the weight of cosmetics smeared all over her face. Underneath it all, she may have been quite pretty. Or she may have been Dirk Bogarde. I will never know.

Later, a very fat woman came in with a trolley and put a plate of something brown and foul-smelling on a table beside me. I couldn't imagine what I'd ever done to her, but whatever it was, it must have been bad. She obviously realised that she'd over-reacted, because half an hour later she came and took the plate away again.

I realise it must be strange for you, being here in England. I realise that we must strike you as a nation of hicks, who only got hot and cold running water the day before you flew in, but even so, I have to tell you that I've heard a lot of this before.

the guards at the door let us through with no more than a glance. British security guards, I've noticed, always do this; unless you happen actually to work in the building they're guarding, in which case they'll check everything from the fillings in your teeth to your trouser turn-ups to see if you're the same person who went out to get a sandwich fifteen minutes ago.

Qui t'as dit que je ne le savais pas ? -Tu le sais ? -Non.

She just played with it slowly, and then pointed a pair of grey eyes at me. I say a pair. I mean her pair. She didn't get a pair of someone else's out from a drawer and point them at me. She pointed her own pair of huge, pale, grey, pale, huge eyes at me. The sort of eyes that can make a grown man talk gibberish to himself. Get a grip, for Christ's sake.

I stayed where I was and watched. The man and the corridor. He didn't make any other noise, and the corridor didn't do anything that corridors don't normally do.

Somewhere a clock ticked. Quite fast. Too fast, it seemed to me, to be counting seconds. But then this was an American building, and maybe Americans had decided that seconds were just too goddamned slow, and how's about a clock that can do a minute in twenty seconds? That way, we get more goddamned hours in a goddamned day than these faggot limeys.

The temperature must have been in the nineties, and there seemed to be far, far too much air in the room. It was bunched and crowded, and in your face and eyes, and it made you think the room was a rush-hour tube train, and a lot of extra air had managed to sneak in just as the doors were closing.

Rayner, I estimated, was ten years older than me. Which was fine. Nothing wrong with that. I have good, warm, non-arm-breaking relationships with plenty of people who are ten years older than me. People who are ten years older than me are, by and large, admirable. But Rayner was also three inches taller than me, four stones heavier, and at least eight however-you-measure-violence units more violent.

Even so, it was a goodish yarn, with plenty of derring-do, and I added some derring-didn' t-really-but-it-sounds-good, just to keep up her glowing opinion of me.

Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. Being House is like flying, too. He's free of the gravity of what people think.

She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes...narrowed them horizontally, not vertically.

Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless