Quotes About Perception

You're spooky, he said, You knew what I was thinking. That not spooky, she said, That's married.

A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don't even realize it. They're opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They're opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world's gone weird.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. —Franz Kafka

We don't call them inmates,' Molly said, quoting one of the psychiatrists.'We call them patients.

to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.

Life would be easy if common sense ruled; but sometimes the easy way doesn't feel like the right way.

I was like a thought slipping through the fissures...

The secret is not to think, we think in words. And what lies beyond the reality we see is a truth that words can't contain, the secret is to feel.

Her imagination was such that she could hear the song of the bird when it was still but a yolk in an egg.

How have you kept yourself as yourself all these years? 'Books,' the boy said. 'Thousands of books.' 'They must have been the right books.' 'Some were, some weren't. You figure out which are which.' 'How do you figure it out?' 'At first by how you feel.' 'And later?' 'By reading what's there on the page and also what's not.' 'Between the lines,' she said. 'Under the lines,' he said. -Annamaria and Timothy -Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 328 chapter 49

My unique path through life has led me, however, to fear known threats but seldom the unknown, while most people fear both.

When a liar became too skilled at deception, he could lose the ability to discern the truth, and could himself be more easily deceived.

The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things.

Where does fiction end and reality begin?

But insanity is everywhere these days, and celebrated. Insanity is rapidly becoming the new normal.

Although my perception might have been distorted by melancholy, it seemed to me that most of those people were in pairs, the larger percentage of them holding hands, as if they were extras in a movie of high romance, accessorizing a scene for which the director's purpose might have been to say that life was a parade lived two-by-two, as it had been since before Noah's fabled ark and as it would be always.

He held the sandwich in his right hand, a cigarette in his left, alternating between the two. When witness to this, I always hoped that in error he would take a bite of the cigarette or attempt to smoke the sandwich, but he never became confused.

War," Pax said, "either dulls the mind to despair or sharpens it toward intuitive truths.

Mr. Thomas, did you know that in an experiment with a human observer, subatomic particles behave differently from the way they behave when the experiment is observed while in progress and the results are examined, instead, only after the fact? Sure. Everybody knows that. He raised one bushy eyebrow. Everybody, you say. Well then you realize what this signifies. I said, At least on an subatomic level, human will can in part shape reality.

One of the good things about being twelve or younger is that you tend to believe that you'll live forever.

People go through life failing to see all sorts of amazing things because they aren't expecting to see them.

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer?

With time, however, life had become too real

When he looked away from her, the bottles were gone and with them all the vertical and horizontal currents of water and brandy that represented the omnidirectional tides of time's ocean.