Quotes About Perception

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

It's the way he gets noticed, you know? I mean, imagine what it would be like if you were a squirrel living in the elephant cage at the zoo. Does anyone ever go there and say, Hey check out that squirrel? No, because there's something so much bigger you notice first.

What is interesting is that elephants can accurately and reliably figure out who is friend and who is foe. Compare this to us humans, who still walk down dark alleys at night, fall for Ponzi schemes, and buy lemons from used-car salesmen.

It's like a telescope. My dad, no matter what he's doing, zooms right in so he can't see anything except what's right there with him at that minute. My mom, she's always on wide angle.

I look at you and I see this amazing, beautiful thing. All these books and songs are written about people looking for the love of their life and never fining it, and we've got it and it isn't worth a damn to you.

Later, as I got to know her, I'd realize that when she gardens, she never sees the seed. She is already picturing the plant it will become. I imagine she thought the same, meeting me.

Sometimes all it take to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

Happiness was relative

I didn't know why it's called getting lost. even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turns to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected

But identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through—the man you fell in love with years ago might look the same and speak the same and smell the same yet be completely different.

Recollections are in the eye of the beholder. No two held side by side can ever quite match.

There's an elderly woman fussing with the top of the cream pitcher, trying to get it open. Her purse sits on the counter, but as I approach, she picks up the handbag and anchors it to her side, crossing her arm over the strap. "Oh, that pitcher can be tricky," I say. "Can I help?" She thanks me and smiles when I hand her back the cream. I'm sure she doesn't even realize she moved her purse when I got closer. But I did.

Sometimes you can't tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. Sometimes you can't recognize love because it's changed you, like a chimera, so slowly that you didn't witness the transformation.

There had to have been a moment where they made a conscious decision to turn away before they saw something they didn't want to.

I stopped trying to figure out American juries around the same time Adam Sandler movies started raking in millions at the box office--people just don't act predictably.

They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don't realize I am one of them.

The scenery you see when you're driving in a car is completely different from the scenery you'd see if you walked the same stretch of road. In the car you might see splashes of color; by foot, you'd realize they are butterflies.

The best lies are the ones that are wrapped around a core of truth.

Okay, but what if death wasn't the ending you've been told it is? What if time is like fabric, a bolt that's so long you can't see where it starts or it ends?" She pauses. "Maybe at the moment a person dies, that life gets compressed so small and dense it's like a pinprick in the cloth. It may be that at that point, you enter a new reality. A new stitch in time, basically.

What we could not see clearly, we didn't have to pretend to understand.

Sometimes you have to have the perspective of distance. And sometimes, you cannot tell what you're looking at until it's right under your eye.

In fact, sometimes I was sure that the reason people stared at you with your crutches and wheelchair had nothing to do with your disabilities, and everything to do with the fact that you had abilities that they only dreamed of.

If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.

con su visión recuperada, bajaba los ojos para no tener que ver.