Quotes About Perception

If canines can be conditioned to salivate over nonexistent food, may not men one day be likewise taught to salivate at the prospect of nonexistent facts?

Translation is a tricky business," Holmes observed, placing the tips of his fingers together in his accustomed fashion. "Cervantes once said that reading something in translation is like looking at a Flemish tapestry wrong side out. The image may be there, but is obscured by a great many dangling threads.

Selfhood is a heavy, hardly translucent medium, which cuts off most of the light of reality and distorts what little it permits to pass.' This is Huxley's central notion [of Grey Eminence], that we should 'stand out of our own light' in order to see the eternal truths.

America is the best half-educated country in the world.

It is true, mountains everywhere are mountains, water everywhere is water, sky everywhere is sky, and men everywhere are men. But nevertheless, if seated before the Alps, you attempt to picture the Himalayas, something inexplicable but convincing will be lacking.

There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does.

A text always remains in crucial ways 'imperceptible'.

Even the most apparently simple statement is subject to fission or fissure.

He was neither good looking nor ugly, and while he would not have turned a young girl's head, someone older might have been struck by his face and the evidence of passion which had left its traces. ~p17

Nicholas Shakespeare

He tells not a half truth, but a truth and a half

Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it.

Believe me, I'm no romantic, and while I've heard all about love at first sight, I've never believed in it, and I still don't. But even so, there was something there, something recognizably real, and I couldn't look away.

Mom says it's because she has PMS. Do you even know what that means? "I'm not a little kid anymore. It means pissed-at- men syndrome

To the stalled mind, the present stage will always seem advanced. To the free mind, the present stage will always seem elementary.

Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

all we ever see of each other is the representation we hold inside our own minds.

I'm overreacting, probably," Sophie says. "I just get a little bored with the abused-women-equals-art thing. It just all seems a bit eighties to me. Do you know what I mean?

God, they don't call you Sherlock for nothing, do they?

Sometimes you feel so happy, it feels almost the same as sadness.

every person's biggest trauma is still that person's biggest trauma. There is no relativity within the realm of one's own subconscious.