Quotes About Perception

This was before I knew that we all live on this planet, driving in the cars of our own little minds, our own self-contained worlds. Yes, this was before I knew that, when I thought that I mattered, when I thought that people saw me, deep into me, saw all my love and excitement at being alive, saw the very glistening, running-overness of my aliveness. But we only matter when we do something awful. Then, someone sees us and only then.

After having much praised or much blamed anybody, one is generally sensible of something just the reverse soon afterwards.

Not bad. Human. You've really got to stop seeing things as all bad or all good. And you've got to learn that just because someone tells you something that you don't want to hear, doesn't mean that person's out to get you.

Love is blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener.

The truth about people had not much to do with what they said about themselves, or what others said about them.

Sometimes he though her coolness not so much a cover as the thing itself, an emptiness

Do you think I'm only here when you look at me?

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes ("News From The World")

When he had first known her, the violent decisiveness with which she judged people had charmed him. For Emma, people were enemies or protectors. Even though the charm had worn off, he sometimes envied her–her sense of others devoid of the kind of complex and enervating reflections he was given to–for within her limits she was clear while he, he thought, moved in a permanent blur.

What we find to love or to hate comes to us as a substitute for something else.

Life meant reducing expectations and making-do with what one had. What was the point of boo-hooing, as she saw it, when "no man is a prince, except in the imagination"? It was the same thing Marcy had said: "No one is as good as you think they are.

Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.

Are you always this wise, Ruth?" "Only when it comes to other people's lives.

And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?

Men hear what they like and invent the rest.

Oh." It seemed I'd surprised him. "There isn't a lot of that kind of thinking around here." "Of course there is," I told him, trying to draw a smile. "It's just usually a man who's doing it.

He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.

Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?

you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars—one, two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself.

Love is a beautiful liar? Beauty was a liar too.

It was possible that all men were difficult to read, but I had to live with Jock through every long