Quotes About Perception

When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature.

I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.

No man hath it in his power to over-rule the deceitfulness of a woman.

I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don't really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition. Clear back to "Don Quixote." I never decided to write in a "new way" at all. It's realism that's fairly new. Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?

It's not emotion that makes him gentle; it's instinct. He can be gentle even when he feels no emotion; he can be gentle when touching something soft. The way you're careful when you touch a peach.

That is, when ordinary reality is perceived as a construction rather than as an objective fact, fantasy can no longer be thought of as what contaminates reality, but should instead be regarded as a process of bringing the world alive for us in a particularly vibrant fashion. According to this vision, "reality" is a fantasy that we elaborate on an increasingly intricate level during our entire lifetimes.

As we have discovered, although on one level psychoanalysis allows us to attain higher levels of perception and self-awareness, on another level it is an exercise in becoming reconciled to the idea that we can never entirely know ourselves.

One might say that instead of regarding psychoanalysis primarily as a therapeutic method, Lacan envisions it as a profoundly philosophical undertaking that—a bit like traditional renderings of the art of living—possesses the potential to revise the subject's perception of the basic orientation of its existence.

The older I get, the more I realize that what other people think about me has little to do with who I am. All of us – Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, even the godless – will always be seen by others through their personal spectacles of perception.

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed the point.

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed its point.

From an evolutionary perspective, he says, it is safest to err on the side of gullibility. "If you miss the tiger hiding in the grass, you're dead. If you're always seeing tigers, you're running away a lot, but you're not dead.

I know everyone has dreams of flying, but this isn't a dream of flying. It's a dream of floating, and the ocean is not water but wind. I call it a dream, but it feels realer than my life.

Life and death aren't as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn't like walking into a new country. This is like walking into a new room in the same house. This is like sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there's a glass wall between.

The world isn't large enough for heroes and monsters at once. There's too much danger of confusion between the two categories.

Dogs can tell how many times a person's heart beats, how many breaths they've taken, whether they're sick, whether they're dying. Dogs can find the secrets their people don't know, tip them over, spill them onto the ground, roll in them

Any season / is a season for blood, if you look at it in the right light.

Is this what love is? That you can see each other, even in the dark?

Here is something I learned in the hundreds of years I spent in the center of the Earth and later in the libraries and bedchambers, pressed between your pages, carving my way out of your stories with one of the knives you gave me to show your readers that I was a spitfire, a flame-breathing beauty with black hair and barbed bits. Imaginary countries and imaginary cunts are in the same category. They are the same story.

My own experiences as a woman tell me it's very possible to be mistaken for monstrous when one is only doing as men do: providing for and defending oneself.

Famous people aren't magic. Despite their thoughts to the contrary.

Hay frases que no se dicen para ser recordadas, sino por el placer de ver los ojos de quienes las escuchan. Hay afirmaciones que se hacen con la intención de provocar un gesto de asentimiento, negaciones que buscan la aprobación del otro; la complicidad surge de compartir instantes que no pueden evocarse.

Wer liebt, ist blind, taub und stumm. Die Liebe verändert den Rhythmus der Tage. Sie macht uns glauben, es sei Sommer, wenn der Herbstregen fällt. Wir spüren mitten in der Sonne Kälteschauer wie im Winter. Sie ist trügerisch und spielt mit uns, dass wir auf das Unmögliche vertrauen...