Quotes About Perception

Don't you understand?" he would say, "You imagine the story better than I remember it.

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

My dear boy, Miss Frost said sharply. My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

In this world," Franny once observed, "just as you're trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar -- you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Own Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe - yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?

She was convinced that women were as often victims of themselves as they were of men.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

Women know when men don't desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death—even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.

When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language.

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.

It seemed to Dr. Daruwalla that his story was the opposite of universal; his story was simply strange - the doctor himself was singularly foreign.

YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM, said Owen Meany. IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!

Only the chicken-lover will understand me. He will give me a kindly look, maybe mildly desirous. His eyes will tell me: You might look a lot better with some reddish-brown feathers.

DREAMS EDIT THEMSELVES; DREAMS are ruthless with details. Common sense does not dictate what remains, or is not included, in a dream. A two-minute dream can feel like forever.

Most men don't mind if another woman watches. It's the women who are watching who don't want to be seen.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

When I first came to Canada, I thought it was going to be easy to be a Canadian; like so many stupid Americans, I pictured Canada as simply some northern, colder, possibly more provincial region of the United States-I imagined it would be like moving to Maine, or Minnesota.

The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been present, he might have drawn new conclusions concerning the Winkles' inability to produce offspring. He would have concluded that the violent athleticism of their coupling simply destroyed, or scared to death, every available egg and sperm.