Quotes About Perception

It doesn't look poor. The place looks

Anyone can talk,' she said, 'but the cleverest people spend their time listening.' And that really pleased me. It provided me with an identity, a sort of camouflage, so I could sit and listen to you all and not get noticed an not be judged for not saying anything.

Happiness is a relative concept.

I offer myself in paint instead. It's self flattering, but that's our prerogative as artists—to record ourselves the way we wish.

Why is it that looking down seems so much higher than looking up?

Some people, possibly aliens, don't favor a dark terminal background. - Hacking the Planet (with Notcurses)

he never felt that way about Japanese - even though he didn't understand it. The fluid monotonic sound of it alone made it a far more beautiful and spiritual language. English, with its heavy stresses and wobbly intonation, was dirty and repugnant to his ears

English, with its heavy stresses and wobbly intonation, was dirty and repugnant to his ears

Do you hear what I hear, babe? Does it make you feel afraid?

People think I'm a miserable sod but it's only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions

The ladders of life that we scale merrily Move mysteriously around So that when you think you're climbing up, man In fact you're climbing down

People think I'm a miserable sod but it's only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

I have got instincts that, I think, are very much in tune with people's very keen sense to see something different. I did not dream of being in politics since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I was not involved in student politics, or not in that partisan way.

Taxpayers loathe bankers not for being capitalists but for being failed capitalists, who picked the public's pockets. If they had been successes, the public would not despise them.

fundamental flaw of modern capitalism is that businesses promote bombastic people. As Cameron Anderson and Sébastien Brion of the University of California, Berkeley, showed experimentally, 'In conditions where there is any ambiguity in competence and performance (which is common in organisations), overconfident individuals will be perceived as more competent by others, and attain higher levels of status, compared to individuals with more accurate self-perceptions of competence.

We start out knowing all the answers, and in the end we realize how little we know. Just the important things. And by that time… no one listens anymore. Hang

Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens.

Sometimes it feels like I live in such a shit town. It meets all reasonable definitions of a shit town. There are still men who put on hats to drive on these roads, our only celebrities are sports stars and newsreaders, and everyone you meet already knows your mother. p.34

We're an easy target for remarks about crossing the border and turning the clock back fifteen years, or a hundred. We're a state that's known for pineapples and cane toads, old bad attitudes and the brain-addling heat that comes from the Tropic of Capricorn sitting right across our middle. We're that kind of state - hot and steamy, unlovely and unloved, far too much fodder here for metaphors about festering and putrefaction.

By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place.  I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family.  But no one is offering any clear information.

We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn't so messed up, it wouldn't be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn't.

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.