Quotes About Perception

But for high-tech products (and many others) promotions can't change reality.

As stated before, I am always tempted to tell marketing people that "I would rather be different than better," knowing full well that if a product is truly different in some ways important to some customers, they will automatically perceive the product as better. Being different and offering customers features and services they cannot get anywhere else is one of the most important things a company can do.

SAY IT. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one.

Look: if a bird were to rub its beak on a limb, you'd hear it—sure—and if a piece of water were to move an unaccustomed way, you'd feel it—that's right—and if a fox were to steal a hen, you'd see-you'd see it—even in the middle of the night; but, heaven help you, if a friend a friend—god—were to slit your throat with his—his love—hoh, you'd bleed a week to notice it.

time cannot do to ordinary things what we timelessly do to one another.

Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night...

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.

I have never seen the Lord God. But I have seen Absalom alive in the tree.

For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of—what?—of science. Death in such a case would be only another arrangement.

Her world must be flat because she disappeared all at once rather than a bit at a time.

Here is history seen, endured, and created at the same time….. If you believe only that which you know to be true, you will trouble yourself with very little belief." On Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" in "Fifty Literary Pillars".

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

no one could say, looking at her lined, pale and puffy face, the shapeless garish sack she had double-pinned around her, or the misfocusing eyes and slack wet mouth, that she had led the right life, and she knew it, not even with Freud's fist could she repress that...

Few of the stories one has it in one's self to speak get spoken, because the heart rarely confesses to intelligence its deeper needs; and few of the stories one has at the top of one's head to tell get told, because the mind does not always possess the voice for them. Even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor or with love, where is that sensitive, admiring, other pair of ears?

Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening—here Orcutt chuckled—it's a matter of light, I understand, but which makes which I can't remember.

Nipples may be said to resemble the ripest of raspberries or perhaps even a thimble, but "why take the trouble when the trouble taken is so evident," though Gass himself is willing to do it and make it look effortless. Maybe they really look like "the lightly chewed ends of large pencil erasers," and for someone who spends his days at his desk that image can prove surprisingly effective.

Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well . . . completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.

Leaves move in the windows. I cannot tell you yet how beautiful it is, what it means. But they do move. They move in the glass.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.

Quantum physicist John Wheeler expressed it this way, when discussing the search for the clockwork mechanism that runs the world, "There may be no such thing as the 'glittering central mechanism of the universe' to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.

It took a long time to get past the wall my demand for objective reality erected, but eventually I learned how to surrender my quest for reality and simply enjoy the experience for itself. And, slowly, I began to realize that "reality" was quite different, and a whole lot weirder, than I'd ever imagined possible.

By convention sour, by convention sweet, by convention colored; in reality, nothing but Atoms and the Void.