Quotes About Perception

Psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if that I was feeling wasn't love then I am forced to admit that I don't know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man.

It will not say, 'Isn't X beautiful?' Such demands are murderous to beauty.

But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.

The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces.

I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

On one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories– predators, twilight, edible – on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.

all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated

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 wirld. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

Een vriend zegt dat gender voor hem net zoiets is als kleur. Gender en kleur delen een zekere ontologische onbepaaldheid: het klopt niet helemaal om te zeggen dat een voorwerp een kleur ís, noch om te zeggen dat het een kleur hééft. Ook de context verandert: 'alle katten zijn grijs', et cetera. Ook is kleur niet echt iets 'vrijwilligs'. Maar geen van deze formuleringen betekent dat het voorwerp in kwestie 'kleurloos' is.

This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart. But whether there is a violence at work here remains undecided.

If a color could deliver hope, does it follow that it could also bring despair?

And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it.

I looked at dozens of apartments and when I entered the hallway of the one I moved into next I knew I could live there because it was cheap and the hallway was baby blue. My friends all told me it smelled as bad there as it did in the last one but I found a heads-up penny on the threshold

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

I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms— if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?

In one of my favorites of your drawings, 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 off their sticks.

How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world be, in essence, the fingerprints of god? I will try to explain this.

But what goes on in you when you talk about colour as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease.

It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional.