Quotes About Perception

Most of us regard good luck as our right, and bad luck as a betrayal of that right.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

Women lie about their age men lie about their income.

...the taste of the finely-worded truth rolled upon the tongue as its thought is revolved in the mind.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it...

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible...

Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...

As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour

Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough -- whatever it takes.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

Truth had hanged the way the landscape had changed to accommodate progress, altered by each generation to its purpose. He had learned from the talk of old men that there was no such thing as truth, truth was always shaded by perception and expectation.

He thinks he's all aces but he's mostly sevens and eights.

What advice Phelan could possibly have given him. All these myriad differences between the world he was discovering and the world he'd been taught. There was nothing in Yeats or Eliot or Browning to cover this: had the situation been reversed, Phelan would probably have been coming to him for advice. He wondered how Eliot would have fared against the look in Sutter's dead eyes.

The cornfield seemed darker toward its center. Light entered at the rows' end, ran like liquid down the middles, getting shallower and shallower. There seemed at the convergence of the rows some mass of shadows light could not defray.

You afoot, the old man said. I knowed your walk the minute I seen you. You always walked like you had the world in your hip pocket. You ain't though, have you? Last time I seen you you was in a fine car. You had big plans.

Sometimes I think you're just too sweet to die Sometimes I think you're just too sweet to die Another time I think you oughta be buried alive. —RICHARD "RABBIT" BROWN, James Alley Blues, 1927

You always was a skinny child but turn sideways you just ain't there atall.

I thought you looked like a man with a bridge on fire, she said.