Quotes About Perception

Pie may just be the Madonna-whore of the dessert world.

I like to tell women to seek out the "puzzle" and the "gem" within the man. The puzzle is, "What makes this person tick? Do I like it?" The gem is, "What is this person's gift? Humor? Honesty? Intelligence?

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him 'the butcher'.

Men carve meaning into women's faces; messages addressed to other men.

You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.

Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she'd still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.

The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.

In reality, serial killers are of average intelligence.

America's media seem utterly lacking in introspection. Do they understand why so many people hate them so? Do they care? Are they so smugly self-righteous and self-regarding they cannot see?

Truth and information are not the same thing! And neither are reality and state of existence!

Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again. You'd only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn't know the difference.

the theorem of incompleteness . . . [shows] there is nothing on this level of existence that can fully explain this level of existence.

Today's hard news stories were yesterday's dystopian SF. Rereading

What a name – Pyotr Frankis. I wondered who had made it up for him. Pyotr Frankis, Jascha – Slavs all over the place, it would seem. Just like my great-grandmother. I felt for her in my mind about the same way you'd feel for a stray piece of food in your mouth with your tongue, but as usual, I had no sense of her beyond a particularly intense memory.

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

Randy knew he wasn't an alcoholic because an alcoholic craved liquor. He never craved it. He just drank for pleasure and the most pleasurable of all drinks was the first one on a crisp winter morning. Besides, when you took it with coffee that made it part of breakfast, and therefore not so depraved.

Are the styles we embrace a matter of taste, or of values rejected?

The biggest problem with communication is the assumption that it has taken place.

Differences in personal style can impose formidable barriers to communication.

George Bernard Shaw summed it up well when he observed that the biggest problem with communication is the assumption that it has taken place.

I've learned to write the truth. But to do that, I had to figure out what the truth was-and I had to realize that the truth isn't always the same for everyone. I had to realize that my truth may not be the same as your truth.

Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.