Quotes About Perception

I wondered then why children played so in the river, but adults ceased to see it with the same eyes. Why couldn't we embrace such simple joys?

Do the strong cry every night for a month? she asked softly. When they need to, I countered, clasping her hand. Women, Arjumand, women are taught that there's no strength in our tears. But why are one's tears powerless, if those tears lead to insight, or a sense of peace?

And that's the great thing about Ye Olde Peruvian Marching Powder, he went on. It's like psychic Saran Wrap: it locks in freshness so well that you can't even feel your own soul ticking, much less anyone else's.

Upper lamp on lowest gain glowing down to white sheets and yellow hair and golden skin—so much gold for so little skin—and all of it, the gently rising flat tummy, the wide eyes closed or shielded or hidden, the positively dreamlike sweep of lines from throat to forehead and back again to the partial view of more yellow hair, but tufted, promising more hair and more gold . . . all of it glowing back up into the lamp, shaming it. Shaming me.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.

No one who is young is ever going to be old.

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

I wonder how many people I have looked at all my life and never really seen.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.

Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them…I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb. You can't make a race horse of a pig. No, said Samuel, but you can make a very fast pig.