Quotes About Perception

Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn't offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn't eat it, although they wouldn't, but because meat doesn't produce dripping any more. The meat isn't real meat any more. Even when it looks like meat, it's something else.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it is usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.

When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.

Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.

Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare.

I was just telling the truth, but people always seem to think you're stark, staring mad when you do that.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

In my experience, there are two things that no one will admit to: having no sense of humor and being susceptible to flattery.

Thus we use our supposed "knowledge" of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is above all else a variable. With a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to see mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

The future cannot be determined. I can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.

When a woman who has much to say says nothing, her silence can be deafening.

Whatever is happening to Pique isn't what I think is happening, whatever that may be. What happened to me wasn't what anyone else thought was happening, and maybe not even what I thought was happening at the time. A popular misconception is that we can't change the past–everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it. What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.

The river flowed both ways.

What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside.

I could not speak for the salt that filled my throat, and for anger - not at anyone, at God, perhaps, for giving us eyes but almost never sight.

Doris is very religious. She says it is a comfort. Her minister is plump and pink, and if he met John the Baptist in tatters in the desert, stuffing dead locusts into that parched mouth for food, and blazing the New Kingdom out of those terrible eyesockets, he would faint. But so would I, likely.

Because they don't know [the anger is] there inside them. [...] They think they are sweet reasonableness, and it's you that's in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life.

Yet sometimes Renaissance Souls don't feel so lucky. Despite a long and proud history of Renaissance Souls who've negotiated treaties, invented revolutionary machines, written great novels, and led victorious armies, our culture often insists that we are defective.