Quotes About Perception

Now she felt as if she were dully humming with an unpleasant, low-grade drunkenness.

He loved the way women, clothed, had a bosom, a single entity, but when unclothed, it cleaved into two discrete parts, two breasts, like the way you could separate an orange into halves by hooking thumbs into it.

When a man speaks that way, people say he has authority. When a woman does, everyone resents her and thinks she's his mother. Or their nagging wife.

Because of course everyone was so 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.

All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family.

It's basically my fear about what happens when you leave a room. Everyone says the thing about you that you really can't bear.

Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.

If love was real, then these bodily, human details could seem insignificant.

Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, 'Do you want a drink, sir?' And Descartes says, 'I think not.' And then he disappears.

She was sexy in a malnourished way; you felt that if you took her to bed, first you would have to give her a hot meal.

In the past, people appreciated artwork. Now artwork appreciates?

Dennis had fallen asleep before Jules got home, though he denied it in that strange way that people often deny they've been sleeping.

all the girls had secretly sprung up in height, even as the teachers and mothers had gotten squashed and lost height and calcium, their bones ground down with an invisible pestle.

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

Ethan Figman, thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime's invisible glass wall, sat with his mouth slack and a record album in his lap.

Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously?

Obviously, there's the seedy side of the strip club world and pole dancing. But, pole dancing, as an art form, is really beautiful. It's been hyper-sexualized because it's associated with strippers, but if you think about it, just in terms of other kinds of dancing, they're using an instrument to create these amazing dance forms.

It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all.

The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?

But it only makes visible a darkness that's already there. Maybe eating it like that…" She looked at Deenie, her voice like a pulse in Deenie's brain. "Maybe you bring the darkness inside you. Maybe Lise has it inside her now.

I know what that's like," he says. "The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.

The world is a fiction the brain constructs

are women so much more ferocious in their violence?

The memories come in pieces. Little bits of grit too small to pick up even with a wetted finer, too small even to hold in my gaze.