Quotes About Perception

He imagines they are uniformly smiling, showing the face they squeeze out with the toothpaste every morning.

Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.

She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.

Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence.

This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.

Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness.

A film can be undermined by the person you're seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot.

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.

I look at you. I know what you are. You are sloppy-bodied, smelly and wet. A woman who was born to sit trapped in a chair while a man tells her how much she excites him.

Is a cardigan what women wear when they don't want to talk about themselves?

If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.

There's just so much time set aside for baffled reaction. I believe we've reached the limit.

Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots.

It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy. He wondered gravely whether things had reached such bad state that only crazy people attempted commonplace acts of kindness, that the crazy and the kind were one and the same.

It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It is a moment never to be thought of except when it is in the process of unfolding.

A word is also a picture of a word.

But she missed simple things, parents' birthdays, a rug underfoot, nights when she didn't have to sleep in a zipped bag. She began to think she was inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith. Head pains hit her at the end of the day. They came with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain-made, the eerie gleam of who you are.

Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat.

I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter's inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.

Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?

I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition.

She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.

Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived.