Quotes About Perception

True hunger is felt in the throat, neck, and mouth, not in the stomach or head. It

True hunger is felt in the throat, neck, and mouth, not in the stomach or head.

Sweetbread is not sweet and it's not bread.

I see it routinely when I get asked to speak at conferences. I'm supposed to come cheap because, after all, I'm just a farmer. If you're smart and capable, you become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, computer technician --- anything white collar. For goodness' sake, don't wear a blue collar. That makes your mother and me a failure and our friends will wonder about our family.

It was the fact that we were selling dead animals. You see, farmers are only supposed to sell live animals to processors and marketers who are supposed to make all the money—those notorious middlemen. After all, we couldn't have all that middleman money going to farmers. No, that wouldn't be right. Farmers are supposed to be peasants, serfs, impoverished dolts, remember?

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much - everything - in a flash - before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.

The Japanese samurai held the view that what was serious for the common man was but a game for the valiant. Noble

We see so much that we in fact see nothing, and we know so much that we no longer possess anything that is our own, that is to say, something we could not have learned, something that arises out of the virtues and errors of our own self.

Pretend that you're a clever shepherd girl, and you're just dressed up in pretty clothes, and you're trying to make everybody believe that you're a spoiled, empty-headed little princess. So no one guesses that under your clothes you're a brave shepherd girl who climbs trees and chases away wolves with your staff.

Teach me, chile, and I shall Learn. Take me, chile, and I shall Escape. Focus my eyes, chile, and I shall See. Consume more chiles. I feel no pain, for the chile is my teacher. I feel no pain, for the chile takes me beyond myself. I feel no pain, for the chile gives me sight. —Transcendental Capsaicinophilic Society, "Litany Against Pain

because we cannot see things beforehand, and only know how dreadfully miserable we are, we think it is always going to be so.

A writer worth his salt is not going to write about how damned lovely it is; it isn't, that's why so many people tell themselves it is [lovely].

I was becoming acutely aware […] that Negroes rarely were allowed to be experts about themselves; others always knew more, wrote or said more, or at least what they said or wrote got around more and certainly was given more credence.

Nineteen twentieths of [mankind is] opaque and unenlightened. Intimacy with most people will make you acquainted with vices and errors and follies enough to make you despise them.

In Virginia... all geese are swans.

I never saw the face of Cobbett...I should not know him if I met him in my porridge dish.

No matter how spectacular their beauty, the deer hunter never sees the mountains.

Imagination need not stand as an obstacle to clear-sighted perception; on the contrary, it can be a prerequisite for recognition of the less obvious aspects of what is really there.

Your friendliness with people does not make them your friends.

as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.

The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation

The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

It was Celeste, his mom. Only now she was younger than he was.

she would freeze and be no help when the danger came. These street girls were never as tough as they made out.