Quotes About Perception

Even though the injury has faded, I still see it the way it was right after the accident: raw and red, a jagged lightning bold splitting the symmetry of my face. In this, I suppose I'm like a girl with an eating disorder, who weighs ninety-eight pounds but sees a fat person staring back at her from the mirror. It isn't even a scar to me, really. It's a map of where my life went wrong.

Close a door, and you'd still feel a breeze through the window.

Just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way.

These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.

Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.

Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind. What Mary really runs isn't a bakery, but a community.

Dr. Keller begins pacing. I don't think we've been hearing Faith just right. Her guard...the words..they sound alike. What do you mean? Your daughter, Dr. Keller says flatly. I think she's seeing God.

You've seen those pictures of couples kissing in front of a Christmas tree, or clasping hands on their wedding day, or holding a newborn baby between them-a snapshot of joy. But what do you really know about them? Just that at the second the shutter clicked, they loved each other. You have no idea what trials came before, or after. You don't know if one of them cheated, if they grew apart, if a divorce loomed on the horizon. You simply see that in one static moment, they were happy.

People had figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were.

So you see, this is why I never told my story. If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it. And if you didn't, you will never understand.

I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magician's assistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.

Things don't always look as they seem.

What's shocking to you isn't that the justice system is flawed, Olivia. It's that you were naïve enough to believe all this time that it wasn't.

Surely she knows --like I do--that fairy tales are just stories. That happy endings aren't real.

Wondering why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience - names they could never live up to - and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation - crosses they'd always have to bear.

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

Change your point of view, and the perspective is completely different.

After years of seeing the world in absolutes, he has taught me how to pick out all the shades of possibilities.

A model's opinion seldom matters. The only time that he is required to open his mouth is when he is required to smile at the camera.

Some think that they are incredible but are actually un-credible. Do you work, master your craft...

It's no use going the extra mile if people don't expect it. You will never get extra credit for it. Just invest it on something else.

Working smart is harder than working hard. It's just less visible, and we care too much about what others see.

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty I woke and found that life was Duty.