Quotes About Perception

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.

The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.

She never puts on any weight, you'll notice that's often true of selfish women.

There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting.

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

Discussion of how California has 'changed,' then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.

Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present, or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.

Memory fades, memory adjusts , memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Les gens qui ont perdu quelqu'un ont un air particulier, que seuls peut-être ceux qui l'ont décelé sur leur propre visage peuvent reconnaître. Je l'ai remarqué sur mon visage et je le remarque à présent sur d'autres. C'est un air d'extrême vulnérabilité, une nudité, une béance.

There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see,we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying. It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight. He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.