Quotes About Perception

The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just.

Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell.

He responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only was my fly undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was.

Let's see, he had told me one night at our hotel's bar, I've been beaten to death with brass knuckles by Robert Mitchum, knifed in the back by Ernest Borgnine, shot in the head by Frank Sinatra, strangled by James Coburn,

Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell. Why's

while the northerners offered a utopia that could be found nowhere, the southerners had created a Fantasia that could be experienced everywhere

But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.

How could I forget that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?

Isn't it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued?

Another affordable way to add a drop of loveliness to the world was not to change it but to change how one saw it.

Like most people, he believed that lies, no matter how often you told them, never became truth.

As for the name they called me, it upset me less than my reaction to it.

And even if we are inscrutable, what does that make white people? Are white people ever referred to as inscrutable? No, you would say that a white person who is hard to read has a poker face, which has a positive connotation, a strategic one, suggesting a careful withholding of information, whereas we are just inscrutable because you white people believe that we always have something to hide

The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles. After

I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word "murder" made us mumble as much as the word "masturbation.

The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.

To avoid talking, we both smoked incessantly and listened to a greatest hits tape of Johnny Hallyday, the sonic equivalent of Ricard Pastis, a taste the rest of the world could not acquire.

Whatever people say about the General today. I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, which makes him not so different than most.

I was doing my best imitation of a Third World child on one of those milk cartons passed around elementary schools for American children to deposit their pennies and dimes in order to help poor Alejandro, Abdullah, or Ah Sing have a hot lunch and an immunization. And I was thankful, truly! But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise, we often deceived over selves when we thought we saw ourselves most clearly.

Which was worse, my country reduced to a war or my country turned into cliché?

I lay down and imagined we slumbered like soldiers even though the only place near Chinatown where one could buy bunk beds was the children's section of gaudy furniture stores, overseen by Mexicans or people who looked like Mexicans. I could not tell anyone from the Southern Hemisphere apart but assumed they would take no offense, given that they themselves called me Chino to my face.

Even poor people in America had refrigerators, not to mention running water, flush toilets, and twenty-four-hour electricity, amenities that even some of the middle class did not have back home. Why, then, did I feel poor?

And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized.