Quotes About Perception

I hope you know what you're doing when you issue me a license to talk. I've heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second

In the summer when the hands of a clock point to seven, it is a nice time to get up, but in winter the same time is of no value whatever. How much better is the sun!

The preacher said, "She looks tar'd.'' "Women's always tar'd,'' said Tom. "That's just the way women is, 'cept at meetin' once an' again.

I remember thinking how wise a man was HC Andersen. The king told his secrets down a well, and his secrets were safe. 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.

But it must be hard living the Lily Maid, the Goddess-Virgin, and the other all at once. Humans just do smell bad sometimes.

The doctor said softly, "Sometimes I think you realists are the most sentimental people in the world.

Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another?

A WAR COMES ALWAYS to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight.

Fella in business got to lie an' cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That's what's important. You go steal that tire an' you're a thief, but he tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.

In all such local tragedies time works like a damp brush on water color. The sharp edges blur, the ache goes out of it, the colors melt together, and from the many separated lines a solid gray emerges.

Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.

Ever'body says words different,'' said Ivy. "Arkansas folks says 'em different, and Oklahomy folks says 'em different. And we seen a lady from Massachusetts, an' she said 'em differentest of all. Couldn' hardly make out what she was sayin'.'' Noah

my father became very Chinese then. He said, 'There's more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar

Out of the long tunnels of his eyes Adam saw his half-brother Charles as a bright being of another species, gifted with muscle and bone, speed and alertness, quite on a different plane, to be admired as one admires the sleek lazy danger of a black leopard, not by any chance to be compared with one's self.

I wonder about people who say they haven't time to think. For myself, I can double think. I find that weighing vegetables, passing the time of day with customers, fighting or loving Mary, coping with the children-- none of these prevents a second and continuing layer of thinking, wondering, conjecturing. Surely this must be true of everyone. Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, and wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely.

Young Henry was conscious, this night, that he had lived for fifteen tedious years without accomplishing any single thing of importance. And had his mother known his feeling she would have said, 'He is growing.' And his father would have repeated after her, 'Yes, the boy is growing.' But neither would have understood what the other meant.

Her life is one of revenge on other people because of a vague feeling of her own lack. A man born blind must in a sense hate eyes as well as envy them. A blind man might wish to remove all of the eyes in the world.

he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do'll make him feel rich—not rich like Mis' Wilson was when she give her tent when Grampa died.

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing.

Sometimes I think a do-gooder is the most dangerous thing in the world.

I know what you hate. You hate something in them you can't understand. You don't hate their evil. You have the good in them you can't get at. I wonder what you want, what final thing.

My wife is a wonderful woman," he said in a kind of peroration. "Most wonderful woman. Ought to of been a man. If she was a man I wouldn't of married her." He laughed a long time over that and repeated it three or four times and resolved to remember it so he could tell it to a lot of other people.

A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms sutlers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them.