Quotes About Perception

Mothers,fathers,our kind,tell me again that death doesn't matter.Tell me it's just a limitation of vision ,a fold of landscape,a deep flax-and-poppy-filled gully hidden on the hill, pleat in our perception a somersault of existence,natural,even beneficent even a gift,the only key to the red-lacquered door at the end of the hall,"water within water," those old stories.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little," wrote Mark Twain, "it's that they know so many things that ain't so.")

Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate," says University of Pennsylvania vaccine researcher David Weiner.

Mark Twain made black people look like buffoons," [says Michael]. Mort doesn't look up. He doesn't know what we're talking about, but that doesn't stop him from joining the conversation. "Michael," says Mort, "Mark Twain made everybody look like buffoons. He was an equal opportunity buffoon maker.

Believable has nothing to do with true

Elliston-Jones know

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.

An unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.

and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else.

In the end, the problem is not so much that people forget, but that they do not always forget the same thing. What still exists as a memory for one person can be irretrievably lost for another, and this creates difficulties, insuperable barriers against understanding.

If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.

feelings were always feelings, subjectively true one hundred percent of the time...

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.

Would it not be better to learn the truth once and for all instead of living in a state of perpetual uncertainty?

When you've lived as long as I have, you tend to think you've heard everything, that there's nothing left that can shock you anymore. You grow a little complacent about your so-called knowledge of the world, and then, every once in a while, something comes along that jolts you out of your smug cocoon of superiority, that reminds you all over again that you don't understand the first thing about life.

A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.