Quotes About Perception

To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish.

Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now.

Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight—the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards. He wondered if that were true. They acted that way sometimes.

This one will be shrewd, I think, and shrewdness is a limitation on the mind. Shrewdness tells you what you must not do because it would not be shrewd.

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco "the City". Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is "city". Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. p197

When you been in stir a little while, you can smell a question comin' from hell to breakfast.

Do you think I'm a child? she asked. Not any more, said Adam, I'm beginning to think you're a twisted human--or no human at all.

Three things will never be believed: the true, the probable, and the logical.

Coming out of sleep, I had the advantage of two worlds, the layered firmament of dream and the temporal fixtures of the mind awake. I stretched luxuriously—a good and tingling sensation. It's as though the skin has shrunk in the night and one must push it out to daytime size by bulging the muscles, and there's an a itching pleasure in it.

An' I got to thinkin', on'y it wasn't thinkin', it was deeper down than thinkin'.

In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears' function to do this just as it is the eyes' business to make stars twinkle.

About Cal she couldn't decide. He disturbed her sometimes with anger, sometimes with pain, and sometimes with curiosity. He seemed to be in a perpetual contest with her. She didn't know whether he liked her or not, and so she didn't like him. She was relieved when, calling at the Trask house, Cal was not there, to look secretly at her, judge, appraise, consider, and look away when she caught him at it.

Finding this potential in my own mind, I can suspect it in others, but I will never know, for no one ever tells.

I had made myself believe that the eyes are not the mirror of the soul. Some of the deadliest little female contraptions I ever saw had the faces and the eyes of angels.

Horace Quinn remembered questioning Adam so very long ago, remembered him as a man in agony. He could still see Adam's haunted and horrified eyes. He had thought then of Adam as a man of such honesty that he couldn't conceive anything else. Adam had been set apart—an invisible wall cut him off from the world. You couldn't get into him—he couldn't get out to you. But in that old agony there had been no wall.

Those people might have been murderers, sadists, brutes, ugly apish subhumans for all I knew, but I found myself thinking, "What charming people, what flair, how beautiful they are. How I wish I knew them." And all based on the delicious smell of soup.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

There is one thing I don't think any one has ever set down although it is true—to a monster, everyone else is a monster.

She looked at him suddenly and closely, to see how he had come so close so quickly. She looked for motive on his face, and found nothing but friendliness. Then she looked at the frayed seams on his white coat, and she was reassured.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen." ? John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

The boys were stunned by the size and grandeur of the West End after their background in a one-room country school. The opulence of having a teacher for each grade made a deep impression on them. It seemed wasteful. But as is true of all humans, they were stunned for one day, admiring on the second, and on the third day could not remember very clearly ever having gone to any other school.

Seems to me you put too much stock in the affairs of children. It probably didn't mean anything. Yes, it meant something. Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?

At the very first he knew he was lying, but it was not long before he was equally sure that every one of his stories was true.

Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be -- more rich and meaningful the farther back it was.