Quotes About Perception

I swallowed at once envying and adoring all the ways in which the word lovely could refer to my mother. So strange still, how different we were.

God'll make a butt-ugly boy, but I ain't never seen him make a ugly girl child.

Her deeply tanned skin and dark gray eyes made people look at her, then look at him. She'd always kept her hair cut short, but that year it had grown into loose curls with so much gray and blond moving through it. They didn't match, the two of them. When he held his arm against hers and asked why, she laughed and said, The black ancestors beat the crap out of the white ones and said, Let this baby on through.

Don't even know they're in the presence of royalty when they ask, How come you all sit together? without checking their own all-white tables.

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame - of everything.

what I'm remembering now is her smile, the way she turned it on people and seemed to make them stutter. I was nineteen and had zero idea what this meant—this power, this deep confidence

Once I asked Miah if he ever forgot he was black. No. I never forget, he said. But sometimes it doesn't matter-like I just am. Then he asked me if I ever forgot I was white. Sometimes, I said. And when you're forgetting, what color are you? No color. Then Miah looked away from me and said, We're different that way.

He looked up abruptly, almost as though he had sensed her entering the room. She found herself suddenly afraid that he had the ability to do exactly that.

In the future he would remember to be kinder to her clothing... provided that she didn't look so damn good in them.

Cats regard people as warm-blooded furniture.

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.

The greatest weakness of all weaknesses is to fear too much to appear weak.

You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.

The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.

We are all bundles of wild and warrantless convictions, especially about one another, and when one gets an accidental glimpse of someone else's candid mind, the sight is dread-inspiring. For his cozy chamber of horrors - and particularly his facts - are owned and enjoyed in complete faith.

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

The worst derangement of the spirit is to believe things because we want them to be so, not because we have seen them for what they are.

C'est que le Diable est bien malin; c'est qu'il n'est pas toujours si laid qu'on le dit.

I rightly pass for an atheist.

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

L'impossible et l'ineffaçable: le réel»

People think that they have no right to judge a 'fact' - all they have to do is to accept it.

The two things cannot be separated. Truth must incarnate itself in reality; reality is empty without truth. If truth is the unfolding of meaning, this is the meaning of what we see to be real and not of an illusion or dream or phantom. This is how it is with us.

I don't disbelieve in anything, Mr. Hatch," and The Thinking Machine regarded the newspaper man quietly. "I don't even disbelieve in what is broadly termed the supernatural-I merely don't know. It is necessary, in the solution of material problems, to work from a material basis, and then the things which are conjured up by fear and-and failure to understand may be dissipated.