Quotes About Perception

The trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.

It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness

The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world's totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas.

There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I'm startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.

This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.

When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.

Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.

The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.

Her mouth tasted of smoke and toothpaste and something feety that made my blood flare

The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.

And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria

This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.

She trained her camera on a fresh-faced hopeful but the pictures she produced were the mug-shots of a raddled old confidence trickster. Exposed, yes, that is the word

He had a special fondness for the moving parts of women, their wrists, their butterfly-shaped ankles, their shoulder blades like a swan's folded wings. In particular he treasured their knees, especially the back of them, where the skin was pale, milk-blue, with delicate fissures, little fine cracks, as in the most fragile old pieces of bone china. — John Banville, April in Spain (Hanover Square Press, 2021)

wanted to tell her about the blade of sunlight cleaving the velvet shadows of the public urinal that post-war spring afternoon in Regensburg, of the incongruous gaiety of the rain shower that fell the day of my father's funeral, of that last night with Boy when I saw the red ship under Blackfriars Bridge and conceived of the tragic significance of my life: in other words, the real things; the true things.

The skin of his weather-beaten face and the backs of his hands is wrinkled and brown and shiny, like shiny brown paper that had been used to wrap something unwrappable.

In fact, it wasn't Cagney so much as Richard Widmark that he secretly imagined himself as, especially in the part of  Harry Fabian in Night and the City, which he had seen four times and

Å»aden szczegóÅ' ludzkiego oblicza nie zniesie dÅ'u?szej obserwacji.

I shall be seventy-two this year. Impossible to believe. Inside, an eternal twenty-two. I suppose that is how it is for everybody old.

I was estranged from myself and all that I had once supposed I was. My life up to now had only the weightless density of a dream. When I thought about my past it was like thinking of what someone else had been, someone I had never met but whose history I knew by heart. It all seemed no more than a vivid fiction.

Auden wrote somewhere that no matter what the age of the company, he was always convinced he was the youngest in the room; me, too.

We have had quite a time of it, quite a time. I move, when I move, in a daze of bafflement. It's as if I had been standing for all my life in front of a full-length mirror, watching the people passing by, behind and in front of me, and now someone had taken me roughly by the shoulders and spun me about, and behold! There it was, the unreflected world, of people and things, and I nowhere to be seen in it. I might as well have been the one who died.

Pomieszczenie wygl?da?o tak, jak je zapami?ta?em. Albo wygl?da?o, jak gdyby by?o takie, jakim je zapami?ta?em, gdy? z regu?y wspomnienia dopasowuj? si? niezauwa?alnie do rzeczy i miejsc z odwiedzanej przesz?o?ci.