Quotes About Perception

Never judge anyone by another's opinions. We all have different sides that we show to different people.

People parted, years passed, they met again- and the meeting proved no reunion, offered no warm memories, only the acid knowledge that time had passed and things weren't as bright or attractive as they had been.

the first part was awesome the second part were gross but still amazing to me

Shame, isn't it? That we only like our heroes out in the street when they are looking their best and their uniforms are 'spit and polished,' and not when they're showing us the wounds they suffered on our behalf.

And it occurred to her that she was so used to turning over everything in her mind, as if each thought were an intricate shell found at the beach, that she had never truly known the value of simply accepting things as they were.

Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

If you come as softly as the wind within the trees. You may hear what I hear. See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly as threading dew, I will take you gladly, nor ask more of you.

Thing about white people," Jeremiah's father tells him, "they know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white" - "Maybe some know it" His father eyed him and smiled "When they walk into a party and everyone's black, they know it. Or when they get caught in Harlem after nightfall, they know it. But otherwise...

But she didn't believe in God. Or Jesus. Or Satan. Or prayer. I believe in words, she said. I believe in numbers and all the history I understand. I believe in things I can see. When he was a little boy she used to hug him and say, And man-oh-man how I believe in you, Aubrey. My love. My light. My life.

I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

Chapter 1 JEREMIAH WAS BLACK. HE COULD FEEL IT. THE WAY THE sun pressed down hard and hot on his skin in the summer. Sometimes it felt like he sweated black beads of oil. He felt warm inside his skin, protected. And in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—where everyone seemed to be some shade of black-he felt good walking through the neighborhood. But one step outside. Just one step and somehow the weight of his skin seemed to change. It got heavier. Light-skinned

That's why I don't buy it when people say children don't know. That they're too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life—crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can't tell me all of it's not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.

But it's what the world does to people. It makes some of us feel ugly and it makes some of us look like criminals, like angry fools.

Stories can be windows, but also mirrors.

THING ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE," HIS FATHER WAS SAYING. They were driving along the Long Island Ex pressway, heading out to East Hampton. There was a house there his father wanted to look at for his next film. "They don't know they're white. They know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white." He shook his head and checked his rearview mirror. "It's strange.

I should have known that sometimes common sense skips a generation.

Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street. Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say, My brother, the people wear doubt thick as a cape until we smile and the cape falls.

Old people used to always say, You only as old as you feel. Here I am closer to fifty than forty, but I feel older than that most days. Feel like the world is trying to pull me down back into it.

Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.

She said she'd chosen Santa Cruz because when se walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white.

And when we pressed our heads to each other's hearts how did we not hear Carmen McRae singing? In Angela's fisted hands, Billie Holiday staggered past us and we didn't know her name. Nina Simone told us how beautiful we were and we didn't hear her voice.

We watched them dip-walk away, too young to know how to respond. The four of us together weren't something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.

Back then, that was as far as Iris could see—pregnancy, then birth, then a baby. She hadn't thought of the shame that would force her mother to move them out of Bushwick. Hadn't thought about the baby growing into a child and one day that child becoming her own age—and older than that.