Quotes About Perception

What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?" "Be a man, I guess," Ethan said...

The mind plays tricks on itself in order to stay in one piece.

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

Inteligente. For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and the she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her glass.

Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. Once she realized this it began to trouble her. Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world. Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.

Jill told him that he just didn't understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end.

Maybe the idea of the supposed tension between working and nonworking mothers had been put out in the world just to cause divisiveness.

When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.

But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly.

And it was true that if you categorized people by which Disney character they were, then Jonah would always be Bambi. Motherless, graceful, unobtrusive. Ethan--Jiminy Cricket, the annoying little conscience... just look at Ash. In the Disney hierarchy she was Snow White... He paused to wonder which Disney character Jules was, and realized that Disney did not make women or girls or woodland animals that were like her.

Power structures were always fairly easy to figure out if you took a moment to observe the people involved.

But maybe in life, she thought later, there are not only moments of strangeness but moments of knowledge, which don't appear at the time as knowledge at all

The human face had too possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.

And then he perceived her politeness or kindness or even her vague responsiveness as interest,

After all, you could use your outside voice and scream your head off, but sometimes it didn't seem as if the screaming was being heard.

Men give women the power that they themselves don't want.

It was exhausting being a schizophrenic, which he was still convinced he was.

Language only felt infinite; instead, everyone swam through surprisingly narrow channels when they spoke or wrote.

The idea that something had been done to you seemed to implicate you, even though no one said it did, making your body—which usually lived in darkness beneath your clothing—suddenly live in light. Forever, if someone found out, you would be a person with a body that had been violated, breached. Also, forever you would be a person with a body that was visible and imaginable.

It could make you slightly psychotic if you really focused on the idea that girls had holes under their clothes. Holes that suggested, in the absence they pointed out, that they could be filled, and that you could do the filling.

But it had seemed, when Cory broke up with Greer, that she became like a piece of knotted wire. Where were the qualities he had loved in her? He had taken on some of them himself. Because of course everyone was soft and hard. Skeleton and skin. But women claimed for themselves the province of softness, which men cast off. Maybe it was easier to say you liked it in a woman. But really, maybe you wished you had it yourself.

To keep people from the particulars of your life kept you from being seen as one thing or another, and so it was possible you could be thought of as anything, or even as everything.

How was it, Cory kept thinking, that when a person died they were no longer anywhere? You could search the entire world and never find them. It was one thing for a body to stop working and be carted away under a sheet; it was another thing for the sense of that person to evaporate. The textural and indisputable sense, as strong but as hard to pinpoint as a gas.

If the twenty-first century taught you anything, it was that your words belonged to everyone, even if they actually didn't.