Quotes About Perception

He'd been reading at a college level since he was seven years old, which maybe didn't mean a whole lot, considering that many college graduates didn't seem to know anything.

even as foolish as Walsh seems, she is moved by a vulnerability that underlies his pomposity.

His clairvoyance is time travel achieved without leaving the present

I thought it was of a heart attack, but then I realized no one ever said as much.

the brain produced

So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn't even see it.

Yeah. Because tonight I was that drawing. I always thought I knew exactly who I was. Then a simple shift of perspective, and I see a different me. Which one is real and which is fiction?

She considers them to constitute a work of art.

It's not tragedy, the way they report it, not horror, certainly not war reporting. It's all spectacle, and once you let yourself see it that way, your soul begins to turn to dust.

stay silent, say nothing, and maybe people would like you. And if you didn't tell them what an embarrassing mess you were, maybe they wouldn't notice.

until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad.

On Religion: I'm reluctant to believe that some statue of the Holy Mother wept real tears in a church in Cincinnati or Peoria or Teaneck last week after the Wednesday-night bingo games, witnesses only by two teenagers and the parish cleaning lady. And I'm not ready to believe that a shadow resembling Jesus, cast on someone's garage wall by a yellow bug light, is a sign of impending apocalypse. God works in mysterious ways, but not with bug lights and garage walls. Dean Koontz Cold Fire

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

She listens to Walsh describe a boat that he observed passing Oak Haven Island;

You're a scary woman, the way you know a man's mind.

Nothing is more dangerous for me than to forget that I am a man both of reason and supernatural perception. When I function in only one mode or the other, I am denying half myself, half my potential

People are books of a kind, each one a story. Sometimes, with no more than a glance or a gesture or a poignant word, they turn a page for you and reveal a deeper truth about themselves than you've seen before.

Maybe it's just that before anything came the word, and words are the roots of everything that our senses perceive. Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos.

I wonder sometimes why those who theorize about the human mind can so easily believe in the existence of things they cannot see or measure, or in any meaningful way confirm as real—such as the id, the ego, the unconscious I—but nevertheless dismiss as superstitious those who believe the body has a soul.

Depending on the breed, a canine's sense of smell is between ten thousand times and a hundred thousand times greater than ours.

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing an eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no delusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is.

Under the final level of apparent chaos, one finds strange order again, and the final level of order is thought." "Thought?

This is reality, tofu man, because reality is what we carry in our hearts, and my heart is full of beauty just for you.

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it's probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it's like to be that lobster in the pot, that's in poetry too.