Quotes About Perception

What's that?" said the cat-- "Faith." "To believe what I tell you about what your don't know," said the fish.

Other men talked about being given the come-on by women they met at parties, but Robbie went to few parties and if he was given the come-on he would not have realized what was happening.

I sing without knowing what my song means, and whether the listening world is amazed or wounded.

Without even trying to be a teacher, Fredrika is teaching us, Showing us how to see things in new ways Instead of always thinking The same old thoughts That have been passed along by strangers Day after day, year after year Without any spirit of amazement Or wonder,

They tell me they do not believe that people are either black or white-- if that were so, then mixed-race children would all be gray instead of a myriad lovely warm shades of natural brown.

When will women not be compelled to view their bodies as science projects, gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained? When will a woman cease to be made of pain?

Never let them know who you really are, how you live, and that you can observe and think, that was her motto.

Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for foices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing n the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.

We chatted for some moments, and Janet joined us, and it was not until some minutes later that I became aware of someone hating me. It is one of those odd but unmistakable sensations one experiences Sometimes on buses or at private dinners, and I looked across the table to observe a young cleric whom I had never seen before regarding me with honest hostility.

Why it is that a garment which is honestly attractive in, say, 1910 should be honestly ridiculous a few years later and honestly charming again a few years later still is one of those things which are not satisfactorily to be explained and are therefore jolly and exciting and an addition to the perennial interest of life.

Women are terribly shocking to men, my dear. Don't understand them. Like them. It saves such a lot of hurting one way and the other.

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.

However carefully a judge is protected by the experience and the logic of the law, there must be times -not many, I know, or we should have no judges- when the same frightful question must be answered. Not faced, you see, but answered. Every now and again he must have to say to himself, in effect, "Everyone agrees that this colour is black, and my reason tells me it is so, but on my soul, do I know?

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." ? Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

What are true things, and what are not? What is good, and what is rubbish? Everything you encounter in life, everything you read, you have to use your own noggin.

We believe what we want to believe." page 109

The tattoo attracts and also repels precisely because it is different.

heavily tattooed women can be said to control and subvert the ever-present 'male gaze' by forcing men (and women) to look at their bodies in a manner that exerts control.

A pale, thin, small woman, perfectly coiffed, perfectly dressed, without makeup, without a single piece of jewelry, ascetic (viperous?) (her heart sullied by the world's contagion?) stands beside Eduardo, making him gigantic: she smiles mechanically.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

I call it Negroland because I still find "Negro" a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures