Quotes About Perception

and he knew that our dreams are none the less terrible to lose, because they have never been the realities for which we have mistaken them.

I was always observing. Even while talking, living, going through every motion, I was watching myself and the situation. That's a writer. Always observing.

Everything was insanely alive, now you see it, now you don't. I thought, it's the light, it's the water, it's changing every second, it's always doing this whether I'm here to witness it or not.

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it's better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don't know very well.

It's not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.

Elaine (de Kooning) wrote, "For the bureaucrat, reality is found in . . .the radio with the advertisements that make claims that he accepts a s false. Reality is the baseball game, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. Reality is conspicuous consumption. All of this in short, is the reality that someone else has made for him. This to the artist is unreality . . .

The abstract artist, he said, would be repeatedly challenged by such skeptics asking, "'What does it mean?'… 'Is it a sky, a house, a horse?'" To which they should respond with confidence and honesty, "'No, it is a painting.'"29

What are you thinking?" She asks. -That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not.

I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad.

All the Jane Austen in the library cannot wash the Queens from this little hand.

I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish praise from blame.

One of the basic tenets of all metaphysical systems of thought is that we create our own reality in accord with our beliefs.

The defendant. For three weeks, everyone in this courtroom had referred to her as "the defendant." Not Casey. Not her given name, Katherine Carter. Certainly not Mrs. Hunter Raleigh III, the name she would have taken by now if everything had been different. In this room, she'd been treated as a legal term, not as a real person, a person who had loved Hunter more deeply than she'd ever thought possible.

think he got a bum rap.

I often think how unadventurous my life must seem from the outside, though I do like my job.

For visions come not to polluted eyes.

Maybe younger than the thirty he looked, still caught in style over substance.

Niggas are in paris

Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back into sanity.

T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind.

I say every dog looks like no other but that isn't true. Not entirely. Difference is slippery.

behind the anger, she saw that he loved her

The difference between a gift and a curse can be how one feels about it.