Quotes About Perception

There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw my fears wanted me to see.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.

To think one thought meant thinking the opposite thought, and no sooner did that second thought destroy the first thought than a third thought rose up to destroy the second.

He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen.

Toute la scène avait quelque chose d'imaginaire. J'étais conscient qu'elle était réelle, mais en même temps c'était mieux que la réalité, plus proche d'une projection de ce que j'attendais de la réalité que tout ce qui m'étais arrivé auparavant. Avec le temps, je commençai à remarquer que les bonnes choses m'arrivaient que lorsque j'avais renoncé à les espérer.

He already understand that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn't see were often more real than the things he could.

I hear her slip into bed with him, and I hear everything that happens after that. Sex is such a strange and sloppy business, why bother to recount every slurp and moan that ensued? Tom and Honey deserve their privacy, and for that reason I will end my report of the night's activities here. If some readers object, I ask them to close their eyes and use their imaginations.

When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel that you are shaking hands with him. Death changes that. This is the body of X, not this is X. The syntax is entirely different. Now we are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of the other people. As for the body, it is no more than flesh and bones, a heap of pure matter.

Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. (…) They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs's soul was gradually given back to him.

At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then.

The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before.

We are not where we are . . . but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

The human body lives in the mind of one who possesses a human body, and to live inside the human body possessed of the mind that perceives another human body is to live in a world of others.

The sky is white. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday. All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now.

Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry's sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy's sadness as his own. Such is the was with dogs.

If there is nothing, then, but silence, is it not presumptuous of me to speak? And yet, if there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place?

Sami sebe sme všetci cudzincami, a ak vôbec máme po?atie o tom, kto sme, je to iba preto, že žijeme v o?iach druhých.

The mind cannot win over matter, for once the mind is asked to do too much, it quickly shows itself to be matter as well.

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.

Kulland???m?z sözcüklere de?i?im dü?üncesini katmazsak çaresizli?imiz sürecek.

?nsan bir kez kendine kar?? olmaya ba?lad? m?, ba?ka herkesin de kar?? oldu?unu dü?ünür.

My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.