Quotes About Perception

It was one of my favorite things about him, how he admired the world like a jewel, turning its facets to catch the light. A well-made boat, a well-grown tree, a well-told story, these were all pleasures to him.

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.

Perhaps she thought I hated her. She did not know that I almost asked him, a hundred times, to be a little kinder to her. You do not have to humiliate her so thoroughly, I thought. But it was not kindness he lacked; it was interest.

Each of her features alone was nothing, her nose too sharp, her chin over-strong. Yet together they made a whole like the heart of a flame. You could not look away.

Now that I knew who she was, such meekness looked absurd on her, like a great eagle trying to hunch down to fit inside a sparrow's nest.

They have wrinkles, but no wisdom.

She [Mother Legge] was a vast, dusky, double-chinned mountain of a woman, with astute, little grey eyes; eyes that seemed rather to aim at not seeing what she wanted to avoid, than at seeing what she wanted to see.

Do you ever feel,' he said, 'as if one part of your soul belonged to a world altogether different from this world – as if it were completely disillusioned about all the things that people make such a fuss over and yet were involved in something that was very important?

I'm sceptical about the reality of everything; even about the reality of Nature. Sometimes I think that there are several Natures ... several Universes, in fact ... one inside the other ... like Chinese boxes ...

She lives so completely in books that I don't think she takes anything that happens in the real world very seriously. She

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made.

It occurred to him that seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.

Aside from anything else marriage may have provided the young grand duchess, it enabled Marie to drop her title and the Romanov name, now considered indecent by the public.

Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it -Barrow's Uncertainty Principle

Einstein argued that the laws of Nature should appear to be the same for all observers in the Universe, no matter where they were or how they were moving. If they were not then there would exist privileged observers for whom the laws of Nature looked simpler than they did for other observers.

My friend Meyer, the economist, says that cretins are the only humans who can be absolutely certain of their own sanity. All the rest of us go rocketing along rickety rails over spavined bridges and along the edge of bottomless gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar.

O thank you, Uncle Omar. Thank you for instilling a helpless youth with such grave suspicions of women and all their works, that here and now, in my maturity, in my thirty-second year, I cannot confront a lovely and half-naked lady without getting cramps in my toes and saying gahr.

Molly Bea, she of the hard white breasts lightly dusted with golden freckles, would never be so humiliated by life because she could never become as deeply involved in the meaty toughness of life. She would never be victimized by her own illusions because they were not essential to her. She could always find new ones when the old ones wore out. But Cathy was stuck with hers. The illusion of love, magically changed to a memory of shame.

Cathy introduced us. Christine stood there inside her smooth skin, warm and indolent, mildly speculative.

In every contact with every other human in every day of your life, you become what you sense they want of you or, if you are motivated the other way, exactly what they do not want.

The intelligence of a mob can be determined by dividing the lowest IQ present by the number of people in the mob.

I could have listed maybe fifty possible reactions without coming close to the one I got. Her eyes dulled and her narrow nostrils flared wide and her mouth fell into sickness. She lost her posture and stood in an ugly way.

I drove out. There were a half-dozen cars there. A house man let me in. Brell came hurrying to me to pump my hand. He was a trim-bodied man in his late forties, dark and handsome in a slightly vulpine way, and I suspected he wore a very expensive and inconspicuous hair piece. He looked the type to go bald early. He had a resonant voice and a slightly theatrical presence. He wore tailored twill ranch pants and a crisp white shirt with blue piping.