Quotes About Perception

I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that i prefer.

Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence.

They think I am concealing my ugliness from them, when in truth it is their ugliness I am hiding.

The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.

Seventeen years being neither a very short nor a very long time, Phillip was remembered and misremembered in equal measure.

What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.

She was too old to be young and other women her age had been crossed off the list of women suitable for appraisal

There's a great many things hard to fathom in darkness that set themselves straight in the light of day.

By the time the words from the bank reached her, the thick white river mist had rinsed the urgency out of them. The words drifted into her ear, washed out and waterlogged, and sounded scarcely louder than the thoughts in her own head.

For the first time in a lifetime by the river he noticed—really noticed—that under a moonless sky the river makes its own mercurial light. Light that is also darkness, darkness that is also light.

Sarà che le emozioni hanno un odore, o un sapore; sarà che le trasmettiamo inconsapevolmente inviando vibrazioni nell'aria.

Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, she realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as if she were recollecting some happiness now lost, so that joy remembered was overlaid with present sorrow.

I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

disregarded, by the wayside. It never failed. A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

any number of peas under the mattress and I would not know it—

So much science has at its root the ability to see afresh what has been seen and thought to be understood for centuries.

For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way.

if you can only learn to see them. The truth had been there all along, only now had I seen

At last, after all the tale telling and all the yarn spinning, after the smoke screens and the trick mirrors and the double bluffs, I knew.

but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood. My

Her presence could be divined in any number of ways by those who had eyes to see. Yet she was not seen.