Quotes About Perception

It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.

A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.

Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters—Vincent

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. — FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn't want to see.

only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.

Priceless. I rolled to face the wall. The recovered Rembrandt had been valued at forty million. But forty million was still a price.

La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.

And the daughter . Bit of a social failure. Well, that's putting it delicately. Quite overweight. Collects the cats, if you know what I mean.

Psychology is a terrible a word.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

He's so particilar, Rembrandt. Even his religious subjects — it's as if the saints came down to model for him in the life… You could pick him out of a line-up, couldn't you…? Goodness written all over him and yet always that twitch of worry and disquiet. That subtle shade of the betrayer

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: 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?

never the way it seems—all good, all bad.

Una cosa era ver un cuadro en un museo, pero contemplarlo bajo todas esas luces, estados anímicos y estaciones diferentes era apreciarlo de mil formas distintas; guardarlo encerrado en la oscuridad —un objeto hecho de luz, que solo vivía en la luz— no estaba bien por muchas razones que no sabría explicar.

aware that Allison's eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.

There's only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.

I felt disincarnate, cut loose from myself. How it would feel to be back in my body again I couldn't imagine.

some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was—and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit.

And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn't see her as I did — if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her— that she would be shocked and touched and maybe even come to view herself in a whole new light if she knew just how beautiful I found her.

Then on the opposite page a different ad, for digital cameras, scrawled in artsy letters and signed Joan Miró: You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

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.

Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can truly understand us.

Quizá la buena suerte se parecía a la mala suerte en que tardabas un tiempo en asimilarla.