Quotes About Perception

She came right up to me and put her snow-white hand on my arm. You poor boy, she murmured, you poor boy. I'm not a boy, and I'm not poor, and I wished the hell she would get away. She has a clever face, but I felt in it, that night, the force of a great sadness and great malice. I see a rope around your neck, she said sadly.

Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.

You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.

You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid.

Percy must have perceived, early in her marriage, that her husband's lechery was compulsive and incurable, but she was determined, like any other lover, to authenticate her suspicion.

O öÄŸleden sonra BeÅŸinci Cadde'den aÅŸa?? yürürken anlayamad???m ÅŸey; öylesine karanl?k görünen dünyan?n birkaç dakikada nas?l bu kadar güzel olabildiÄŸiydi.

When he was young, brooks had seemed to speak to him in the tongues of men and angels. Now that he was an old man who spoke five or six languages - all of them poorly - the sound of water seemed to be the language of his nativity, some tongue he had spoken before his birth. Soft and loud, high and low, the sound of water reminded him of eavesdropping in some other room than where the party was.

What I did not understand, as I walked down Fifth Avenue that afternoon, was how a world that had seemed so dark could, in a few minutes, become so sweet.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

Beware you do not damage, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.

Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth? He was not a practical joke nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. He was not a practical joke nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.

Her hair was dyed, and her bloom was fading, and she must have been crowding forty, but she seemed to be one of those women who cling to the manners and graces of a pretty child of eight.

The people in the Farquarsons' living room seemed united in their tacit claim that there had been no past, no war—that there was no danger or trouble in the world.

isn't it true that when some couple celebrates their tenth or fifteenth anniversary they seem far from triumphant? In fact they seem duped while dirty Uncle Harry, the rake, seems to wear the laurels.

Art is the resonance of inseeing joy.

OTTO. Apes don't read philosophy. WANDA. Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it.

I realised that I really disliked him, and I knew exactly why: he didn't know the difference between being solemn and being serious.

You do realize as you grow older that almost nobody knows what they are talking about.

His persona seemed very odd to me: it was as though he'd once seen an intellectual, and had spent the rest of his life impersonating him.

The neurologist and psychologist Maurice Nicoll told how he had once asked his headmaster about a passage in the Bible, and after he had listened to the answer for some time, he realized that the man had no idea what he was talking about. What I admire about Nicoll is that he made this discovery when he was only ten. It took me another forty-five years before the penny dropped: very, very few people have any idea what they are talking about.

but now I began to notice odd moments that suggested he was not the brightest lighthouse on the coastline. For instance, he once got very cross during assembly because he felt the boys had become lazy, and so he demanded that every single boy in the school should improve his ranking in class in the course of the next fortnight.

Graham always used to say that I was shocked when he came out. That implies some sort of moral objection. Untrue. I was not 'shocked', I was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very surprised.

British journalists tend to believe that people who become good at something do so because they seek fame and fortune. This is because these are the sole motives of people who become British journalists.

The Buddhists have a phrase for this—"Beginner's Mind"—expressing how experience can be more vivid when it's not dulled by familiarity.