Quotes About Perception

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 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.

Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need to, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

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.

Let me spell it out for you. When a man's got something he don't give tuppence about and another man wants it enough, thruppence will usually do it.

Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story.

turn all the mirrors to the wall.

There was no rational explanation for what she had seen. It was unscientific. And Hester knew the world was totally and profoundly scientific. There could be only one explanation. "I must be mad," she whispered. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils quivered. "I have seen a ghost!

And is it better to know?" he asked me. "I can't tell you. But once you know, it's impossible to go back.

Readers,' continued Miss Winter, 'are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.

By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.

I was not transparent, that she could not see straight through me

could just see the movements of Miss Winter's lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye, like the long legs of a spider around its body.

But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.

copper curls turned. I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real

she could not be less than seventy-three or -four, and to judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could be no more than eighty.

I'm sorry," I heard her say. "One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Her hair was a dirty color that was too dark to be blond, her chin was big and her eyes were small.

A man like me gets used to recognizing himself from the inside. The inside is what I am familiar with. Nor am I much given to studying my outward appearance in the looking glass. It is a curious thing, to see oneself in a photograph. It is a meeting with the outer man.

If you dazzle a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won't notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him.

Cualquier institutriz, después de pasar unas pocas horas en esta casa, se habría hecho una idea clara y completa de la tarea a la que se enfrenta; pero el médico es un hombre, de modo que no puede percatarse de lo tedioso que a cualquiera le resulta que le expliquen detenidamente lo que ya ha entendido.

When there is no light to see by, any drunk can walk in a straight line!

But you know it was here? In this house?" Aurelius shoved his hands into the depths of his pockets. His shoulders tightened. "I wouldn't expect other people to understand. I haven't got any proof. But I do know." He sent me a quick glance, and I encouraged him, with my eyes, to continue. "Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. I can't explain it.

I believe you," I repeated, my tongue thick with all the waiting words. "I've had that feeling, too. Knowing things you can't know. From before you can remember." And there it was again! A sudden movement in the corner of my eye, there and gone in the same instant.

for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.