Quotes About Perception

I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger.

people whose names would tell a different story, although not necessarily to a different hundred people.

I WAS trained to distrust other people's versions, but we go with what we have. We triangulate the coverage. Handicap for bias. Figure in leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation. Consider what filter is on the lens. So to speak.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

Particularly out here tonight, in this country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter, it is difficult to believe that "the good" is a knowable quantity.

This is in fact the kind of story we expect to hear about our elected officials. We not only expect them to use other nations as changeable scrims in the theater of domestic politics but encourage them to do so.

I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own.

Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane.

In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

They are very gracious and very enthusiastic, and give such an appearance of health and happiness and hope that I sometimes find it difficult to talk to them.

The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.

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

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I.

Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.

Everyone has his or her Frrance, his or her Paris, just as everyone has his or her London or New York. This stubborn habit strikes me as self-protection, an old tribal instinct for never showing one's back. Not knowing, not having gotten there first (and pocketing the goods), seem to implicate us as fools or rubes.

arguing too loudly to hear him. He sometimes couldn't help

No sabem res de nosaltres mateixos; estem plens per dins de coses que ni sospitem. És per a nosaltres mateixos que som més incomprensibles.

No sabem res dels altres, ni ens importa; en canvi, voldriem que els altres ens coneguessin a fons. El nostre afany de ser compresos només es pot comparar amb la nostra desgana per comprendre ningú.

People always went for the romantic interpretation; you couldn't blame them for that. What they felt most strongly seemed most true. But other forces were operating in the world.

So, in the end, we were hypocrites for kindness. Both of us. Standing with my bouquet of orange blossoms, I thought: I'm happy but I'm in disguise. But probably many people feel that at their weddings.

He had never lied to me, as far as I knew. But did I know anything?