Quotes About Perception

in acoustic culture, the world, like sound, is all around you, and comes at you from all directions at once. It is multilayered and nonhierarchical; it has no center or focal point.

Does asking oneself these questions in an attempt to see how the machine works spoil the enjoyment? It hasn't for me. Music isn't fragile. Knowing how the body works doesn't take away from the pleasure of living.

that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.

Anything that sounds or looks beautiful would seem to that crowd to be merely pretty, shallow, and therefore deeply suspect—morally suspect, even, I found out. Noise, for them, is deep; beauty shallow.

Every outfit carries cultural baggage of some kind. It took me a while to get a handle on this aspect of performance.

what factors external to the music itself can make it resonate for us. Is there a bar near the stage? Can you put it in your pocket? Do girls like it? Is it affordable?

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying.

The more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know.

Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.

When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that can not be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to share. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

Everyone is told just as much as he needs to know, including the self.

People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.

Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don't soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

You know, I've never actually really believed that death is inevitable. I just think it's a rumor.

Don't mistake legibility for communication

Never mistake legibility for communication.

How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?

All knowledge arises from a relationship between a knower and an object of knowledge.

People are trying to be smart—all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it's harder than most people think.