Quotes About Perception

Nothing she says has a single meaning, nor a single intention, yet she is steady. She knows herself.

All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet.

This was a man who moved like the gods were watching: every gesture he made was upright and correct. There was no one else it could be but Hector

He admired the world like a jewel, turning its facets to catch the light.

Two children he had had, and he had not seen either clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

However I pretended I could conceal my thoughts as well as he, I knew it was not true. He would see down to my bones. He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles' and Ajax's. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.

I did not pretend to be a mortal. I showed my lambent, yellow eyes at every turn. None of it made a difference. I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered.

Me bastaba un simple roce o el olor para identificarle, y si me quedara ciego, podría reconocerle por el modo en que respiraba o en que pisaba el suelo. Le reconocería en el fin del mundo, incluso en la muerte.

She was a poisoner at heart; she wanted to be sure I came as villain, not savior.

Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed

After, in the torchlight, he wondered at the marks on me, the red around my neck, and the purple on my arms and chest where he had gripped me. He rubbed at them, as though they were stains, not bruises. "The color is perfect," he said, "look." And he held up the mirror so I could see. "You make the rarest canvas, love.

HER FINGERS RAN LIGHTLY over the beams, stroked the threads of the weft like a stable master greeting a prize horse. She asked no questions; she seemed to absorb the loom's workings by touch alone.

He was watching me closely, reading my face over and over, like a priest searching the auguries for an answer. I could see the slight line in his forehead that meant utmost concentration. Something shifted in me then, like the frozen surface of the Apidanos in spring. I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another... We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows? Perhaps one day I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you... We are men only. A brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please.

Telemachus the Just," I said. He smiled. "That's what they call you if you're so boring they can't think of something better.

Once when I was young I asked what mortals looked like. My father said, "You may say they are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale.

perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

I brought a withered flower back to life. I banished flies from my house. I made the cherries blossom out of season and turned the fire vivid green. If Aeetes had been there, he would have choked on his beard to see such kitchen tricks. Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

It was a trick of his, to set a sentence out like a plate on a table to see what you would put on it.

When at last they pulled off the veil, they say my mother smiled. That is how they knew she was quite stupid. Brides did not smile.

I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it—

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the Earth. I would him in death, at the end of the world

They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry. Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.