Quotes About Perception

Romantic lovers require from each other at least the facade of reason: We desire to be what romantic love makes us appear in the other's eyes. We want to imagine we are deserving of the love we inspire.

I think sex is very interesting for most people, but I'm interested in sex as a way of communication, I'm not that interested in the fantasy version of a sex scene.

He complained to me on one of our rides to school that there were too many Italian and Irish students at Fordham

Trump was neither Jewish nor Swedish; Fred Trump, a first-generation American born to German parents, had developed the habit of telling people the family was Swedish because they had so many Jewish tenants and, after World War II, he did not want to repel them. Donald perpetuated the fiction for many years.

You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more "male," mine, more and more "female." But that's not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.

58. "Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing" (Leonardo da Vinci).

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

I can remember a time when I took Henry James's advice--'try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'--deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either.

Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess "color." You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we "get around" in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

130. We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try.

Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment.

When I say "hope," I don't mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it's worth it to keep one's eyes open.

WHAT IT IS It is what it is. But what is it? What it is— Some soft tautology whose terms are touch Time to give, time to give it up.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. We ought to, but we don't—or at least, we don't quite as readily. But the more you do, the more quickly you can recognize the feeling when it comes around again, and hopefully you won't need to stare as long.

51. You might as well act as if objects had the colors, The Encyclopedia says. –Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise?

two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, "You're more interested in fantasy than reality". The other responds, "I'm interested in the reality of my fantasy." Both of the Popsicles are melting of their sticks.

I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it.

You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That's part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.

For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it's orange, that we're normal. 39.

Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing' (Leonardo da Vinci).

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate on them well," wrote Emerson. Is it true? If so, who can bear to believe it?

While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see "brutal honesty" not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn't necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it—something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.