Quotes About Perception

White people love you, don't they? They only like me. They think I'm a dainty little china doll with bound feet, a geisha who's ready to please. But I don't talk enough for them to love me, or at least I don't talk the right way. I can't put on the whole sukiyaki-and-sayonara show they love, the chopsticks in the hair kind of mumbo jumbo, all that Suzie Wong bullshit, like every white man who comes along is William Holden or Marlon Brando, even if he looks like Mickey Rooney.

If I'm unreadable—if all these Asians you refer to are unreadable—perhaps we are only unreadable to those who do not know how to read. Semantics—

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven't lived through one yet.

No matter whether my eyes were open or shut, I could still see it, the crapulent major's third eye, weeping because of what it could see about me.

And there you have the absurdity.

Don't you get it? They've got no intention of coming back. They know it's a suicide mission. Life's a suicide mission.

the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere.

It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.

It was a little past nine o'clock when I checked my watch at the entrance to his apartment building, a gray two-story factory for manufacturing hundreds of tired replicas of the American Dream. All the inmates imagined their dreams to be unique, but they were merely tin reproductions of a lost original.

Pidin itseäni runoilijana. Sinä pidit itseäsi toimittajana. Sinusta minä olin kohtalainen runoilija. Minusta sinä olit kohtalainen toimittaja.

good-bad,right-wrong,once you tag things like that,you lose the ability to see the complete truth.... A murderer can also be a loving father. Don't tag things. Words are insufficient to describe the picture in totality. Try not to get trapped in the dictionary meaning of words.

appearances can be deceptive and the dividing line between good and bad is very thin indeed.

The one conclusion I have reached is that whiskey is a great leveler. You might be a hotshot advertising executive or a lowly foundry worker, but if you cannot hold your drink, you are just a drunkard.

And I realized again that real life is different from reel life.

Till now, my conception of love has been based entirely on what I have seen in Hindi films, where the hero and the heroine make eye contact, and whoosh, some strange chemistry sets their hearts beating and their vocal chords tingling, and the next you see of them they are off singing songs in Swiss Villages and American shopping malls.

Never judge a man's actions until you know his motives

The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.

if you want to live in the city you have to think ahead three turns, and look behind a lie to see the truth and then behind that truth to see the lie.

We may read the same texts, but the dhvani that manifests within you will be unique. Your beauty will be your own. If you re-read a story that you read 10 years ago, its dhvani within you will be new. Poetr's beauty is infinite.

Vikram Chandra

Perhaps it is true that for all the evidence of the mirror, one pictures oneself in some deep niche of the mind as forever 18.

L'ottusità degli uomini intelligenti, pensò Savita con un sorriso, è la metà delle ragioni che li rendono amabili.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored

A learned woman is a lost woman.