Quotes About Perception

His best moment was when he walked up the majestic stairway to the second floor of the Met; he loved the glorious spaces of old exhibition halls. Not that they knew about old here, with buildings always being blasted and rebuilt higher. How did people in this city keep track of themselves, with so much coming at them at once?

She understood very well that when you took a good look under a clear, hard light, the world was a fucked-up hellhole. Most people knew this, she'd known this, but nobody wanted to think about it all the time. It didn't pay to forget for too long.

She preferred keeping her mouth shut and appearing a fool to opening it and removing the doubt.

Some folks called Dewar a dilettante; he did not consider it an appropriate term, indicating as it did a lack of seriousness, a trifling sort of interest.

I get so sick of people asking me, "Do you work?" Of course I work! I've got five children under ten—I work twenty four hours a day! But of course they mean, "Do you work for pay, outside your home?" Sometimes I hear myself say, "No, I don't work," and I think, "That's a complete lie!

When I was a girl, the crows knew when I was on my way to chase them from the fields, and how long I'd stay once I got there. They would bide their time, keeping me in sight until I'd completed my rounds. Then they'd descend on our fields. But their feet limit them from eating foods with hard shells. They are nowhere near as dexterous, or as smart, as parrots.

Sagittarians rarely talk about their feelings—they talk about what they think about their feelings.

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the trouble with women, too. [ Existence (1975)]

Watch: (1) You do something nasty to me. (2) I hate you. (3) You find it uncomfortable to be hated. (4) You think how nice it would be if I didn't hate you. (5) You decide I ought not to hate you because hate is bad. (6) Good people don't hate. (7) Because I hate you I am a bad person. (8) It is not what you did to me that makes me hate you, it is my own bad nature. I—not you—am the cause of my hating you.

Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.

Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference... I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.

We're so useful, we practical people. We hold it altogether. But we're seen as killjoys, somehow. Most unfair.

I feel at the moment I can't complete, that I've become smug and pissy and I Haven't a sense of Humor.

Being mature isn't what it's cracked up to be.

And even if cats were color-blind, a fact that she sometimes doubted, he was content with Hannah's appearance as long as she kept his food bowl full.

Perhaps the mirror in Sally's dressing room had waved the wrong way and caused her to look larger than she actually was. And perhaps all that skipping had jumbled her brain and affected her ability to separate reality from wishful thinking.

Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored.

Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.

Like a domestic cat, purring on the sofa by day, but by night, a strutting queen, a natural killer, disdainful of her other life.

A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.

No one looks at us. We might as well be invisible; or clothing marks us as strangers, transients. They are polite, so polite; no one stares at us.

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.

From a certain height, everyone looks the same - men, women, villains, kings - as if rank and fortune were simply an accident of perspective.

Why can't they see, mon père? Why can't they see what the woman is doing to us? Breaking down our community spirit, our sense of purpose. playing on what is worst and weakest in the secret heart. Earning for herself a kind of affection, of loyalty that - God help me! - I am weak enough to covet.