Quotes About Perception

As time passes in Heaven, the stars do not change places, not till the day when Zig changes the complete backdrop. I tell my students this is a metaphor for life; we go along thinking nothing will be different, till the day everything suddenly changes at once.

We find a place on the lower [sic] East Side," confesses one suburban couple in the genteel pages of the New Yorker: Ludlow Street. No one we know would think of living here. No one we know has ever heard of Ludlow Street.

In the dance of infatuation, we see others not as they are, but as projections of who we want them to be. And we impose on them all the imaginary criteria we think will fill the void in our hearts.

They say that love is blind, but it's trauma that's blind. Love sees what is.

The most important belief we possess is a true knowledge of who God is. The second most important belief is who we are as children of God, because we cannot consistently behave in a way that is inconsistent with how we perceive ourselves.

Black and white, good and evil, is just a way to simplify life and make it easier for people to deal with. People love it too; that's why so many people go to church on a Sunday.

Sometimes if you hold back on someone, they mistake your kindness for weakness. Sometimes you've got to go all out, to show people that you mean business.

To them, kindness was seen as weakness, mercy was perceived as cowardice and negotiation was a code word for a bullet in the head.

Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.

As soon as you start talking about mystique, you have none.

Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel

good from far but far from good as the saying goes

I would be a huge hypocrite if I didn't tell you that at one time in my life I thought the way that you made music was you got on a major label and you got famous.

If spectacle is lacking in everyday life, it may be because we have forgotten where and how to look.

you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.

It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it.

But Amina couldn't stand to look. It wasn't that George was old but that he felt sorry for himself that drove her crazy. If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke—and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth?

Charlie and I both felt very adult that last year of college, very experienced: I think we believed that what we'd achieved academically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it.

I read this article about how you can have anything going on in your head, as long as it doesn't manifest itself. Like a reflection.' I waited for my sister to expand on that, but she remained quiet. 'LIke a reflection that's different from what's doing the reflecting,' I suggested.

Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone. She was older in English, and also less fastidious; she was the parent to her parents.

Was there a person who existed beneath languages?

She had believed that she'd been born with a soul whose thoughts were in no particular dialect, and she'd imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself.

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.