Quotes About Perception

Seeing Seb's jeering face, it came to her that Seb had always loved her the way most people bear a grudge.

I know Brian is nasty, but I had always thought it was his situation before this,' Nirupam remarked.... Charles could not answer at once, because he was not sure that a person's character could be separate from his situation in quite this way.

We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention

We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.

Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.

Rainer Maria Rilke] speaks of absorbing Earth's phenomena with the full frenzy of human relish and insight as our destiny: It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again... We are the bees of the invisible... [Our work is] the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. But they are shapes, they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.

Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.

Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth. ... Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? ... Time becomes even more elastic than usual--minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together. [p. 97]

Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it's mystifying and scarcely believed.

The senses don't just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.

Each photograph is a magic lamp rubbed by the mind.

Inevitably, fear raided everyone's mood. But as zookeepers, the Zabínskis understood both vigilance and predators; in a swamp of vipers, one planned every footstep. Shaped by the gravity of wartime, it wasn't always clear who or what could be considered outside or inside, loyal or turncoat, predator or prey.

It's a funny thing, Jan went on, she's not a child, she's not stupid, but her relationship with other people tends to be very naïve; she believes that everyone is honest and kind. Punia knows that there are bad people around her, too, she recognizes them from a distance. But she really can't believe that they may hurt

So couples relive romantic memories, families watch home movies, and friends catch up with each other, as if they've lagged behind on a trail. Sifting memory for saliences to report, they reveal how vital pieces of their identity have changed. Aging, we tailor memories to fit our evolving silhouette, and as life's vocabulary changes, memories change to fathom the new order. Lose your memory, and you may drift in an alien world.

in doing the finite [we] may perceive the infinite.

Poetry is a kind of knowing, a way of looking at the ordinary until it becomes special and the exceptional until it becomes commonplace.

A frog croaked a deep throaty I am .

Smell was our first sense, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from our olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding

One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.

I mean, it's very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.