Quotes About Perception

The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits

really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular.

And if what they say is true--if every great painting is really a self-portrait--what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

the world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can't boil down to pure 'good' or pure 'bad' like you always want to do—? Like, your two different piles? Bad over here, good over here? Maybe not quite so simple.

how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

If I thought my kid was a bastard I would sure the fuck name him something else.

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, Ive come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in. You didn't feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.

Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

I turned, painting in hand, to show it to her, and then realized she wasn't there. Or - she was there and she wasn't. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I hadn't understood before.

the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth

The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star Ã¢â'¬Â¦

There wasn't a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.

Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.

Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: One of Julian's most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light. And under it, in a different ink, maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well(?) -Richard

That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were plenty of things they didn't let me in on and would not for some time. And though I tried to ignore this I was aware of it all the same.

The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.

L'esprit est son propre lieu et peut faire en lui-même un Paradis de l'Enfer et ainsi de suite

I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away.

She cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary.

Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took awhile for it to sink in. You don't feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.