Quotes About Perception

Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There's no knowing how he might choose to be with her.

She sees the girl, Iris, sitting with her legs crossed at the table, and it strikes Esme as odd that she herself had been sitting there too, just a moment ago. She sees the chair that had been hers—that is still hers. It is angled away from the table and there is her plate, with the half-eaten potato. Amazing how easy it is to get up and walk away from a table, from a plate of food, how no one stops you, how it wouldn't occur to anyone here that they could stop you.

And there is a soreness to her body, it aches, her head feels softened, muzzy. She has acquired a disturbingly acute sense of smell. The odour of print from a magazine someone is reading across a room can oppress her. She knows what will be on their plates at lunch just from sniffing the air. She can walk down the middle of the ward and can tell who has bathed this week and who has not.

A bee drones by, scribbling on the air near their heads...

Will you listen to yourself, she said to him, and added, eejit, just loud enough for him to hear. When I looked back at him I saw that he was looking at her, I saw the way it was, that he might dissolve like sugar in water, and when I saw this I—

younger women as they pass us in the street, with their cigarettes, their makeup, their tight-seamed dresses, their tiny handbags, their smooth, washed hair, and we turn away, we put down our heads, we keep on pushing the pram up the hill.

I am the only tea abstainer in my family. I think they regard this as a baffling perversion. To me, tea tastes like dried lawn clippings, diluted leaf mold, watered down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid. I have never been able to stomach it.

My wife, I should tell you, is crazy. Not in a requiring-medication-and-wards-and-men-in-white-coats sense— although I sometimes wonder if there may have been times in her past—but in a subtle, more socially acceptable, less ostentatious way. She doesn't think like other people. She believes that to pull a gun on someone lurking, in all likelihood entirely innocently, at our perimeter fence is not only permissible but indeed the right thing to do.

Look, I'm not a demon here. I don't eat babies or kick puppies. I just tell the truth." She shrugged. "Can I help it if that makes the liars of the world angry?

I've never believed there is any animal more dangerous than a human being. I never will. It's the intelligence. It's the mind that makes it so.

That was sarcasm. I cannot read tea leaves. I mean, not unless someone lines them up in the shapes of letters.)

An evil-minded man is quick to see His neighbour's faults, though small as mustard seed; But when he turns his eyes towards his own, Though large as bilva fruit, he none descries.

The moon is one, but on agitated water it produces many reflections. Similarly ultimate reality is one, yet it appears to be many in a mind agitated by thoughts.

Experience shows that Being is the essential, basic nature of the mind; but, since It commonly remains in tune with the senses projecting outwards toward the manifested realms of creation, the mind misses or fails to appreciate its own essential nature, just as the eyes are unable to see themselves.

Those with the greatest awareness have the greatest nightmares.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning.

Words are the map not the territory, they are the finger pointing towards the moon not the moon itself.

Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.

No one has arrived. Leave me there as you would leave a myth with any person who sees you until he cries and rushes into himself, afraid of happiness.

We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

Everything around me looks like me and I look like nothing here

Letters are restless, hungry for an image, and the image is thirsty for a meaning.

There is no tomorrow in This desert except what we saw yesterday