Quotes About Perception

He wandered off, leaving me to wonder why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience—names they could never live up to—and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation—crosses they'd always have to bear.

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been?

Lucy} knew other things too, more important non-school things. She knew that when grown-ups lowered their voices it meant you had to listen harder.

one person's trauma is another's loss of innocence. Ervin

F=R/E o, lo que es lo mismo, Felicidad es igual a Realidad dividido por Expectativas)

I woke up with an unfamiliar taste in my mouth, part sweet part sour, it took me days to realize this was simply hope.

True confession? The reason we don't talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.

There's nothing worse than silence, strung like heavy beads on too delicate a conversation.

It struck Lacy that she didn't really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing.

Does it even mean anything to him anymore? If you say the same words over and over, do they become so bleached that there's no color left in them?

I didn't want to be treated like him," Josie said, answering her mother, when what she really meant was, I wasn't brave enough.

Do you have kids? Anna asks. I laugh. What do you think? It's probably a good thing, she admits. No offense, but you don't exactly look like a parent. That fascinates me. What do parents look like? She seems to think about this. You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.

We're conditioned to seeing men holding guns, but not men holding hands.

Truth expands until it can choke you.

Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that we are never the people we think we are.

I started to wonder what it might have felt like to live your life in a place someone else had carved.

I have this math teacher, Mr. Allen. He said that when you're a point, all you see is the point. When you're a line, all you see is the line and the point. When you're in three dimensions, you see three dimensions and lines and points. Just because we can't see a fourth dimension doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we haven't reached it yet.

She wondered if grief could make time run faster, like a glitch in a clock.

gente se ha inventado todo tipo de formas de hacer que las cosas parezcan diferentes de lo que son en realidad. Una habitación puede sumirse en una noche artificial. El Botox transforma los rostros de las personas en algo que no son. El TiVo te hace creer que eres capaz de congelar el tiempo, o al menos de reordenarlo a tu antojo.

She watched Peter's face transform as she spoke, like the change of a season. Why hadn't she taken the time before, when she had it, to tell Peter that she understood?

Driving home, I am struck by the sudden thought that the world is inflatable, trees and grass and houses ready to collapse with the single prick of a pin. I have the sense that if I veer the car to the left, smash through the picket fence and the little Tykes playground, it will bounce us back like a rubber bumper.

one person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

If you've lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it and if you didn't, you will never understand.

And Peter, with his 20/20 vision, cast his eyes downward, so that he wouldn't see.