Quotes About Perception

Meine Wissenschaft gibt mir Wachträume, die andere nicht einmal im Schlafen haben." Peter Handke: Langsame Heimkehr. Erzählung. Frankfurt am Main 1994, S. 63.

Life is a poem, look carefully and you will find a verse. Peter Harrison December 2016

Being with Steffens is to me like flashes of clear light; it is as if I see him, and myself, and the world, with new eyes." Steffens

In my judgment, we suffer quite as much from exaggerated, hysterical, and untruthful or slanderous statements in the press as from any wrongdoing by businessmen or politicians.

Two caveats about this collective brainwashing need stressing. First, it did not necessarily change what older people thought, but it decisively changed what they would say or do.

Psychologists call this sort of mental mechanism, in which beliefs conform to behavior rather than the other way around, a response to "cognitive dissonance,

Reality confounds image.

In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

I have seen God and he is this girl.

Wait a minute, I'm thinking, was this another one of those conversations where what is meant and what is being said are not the same thing?

Stupid people often say the smartest things.

Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.

What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.

Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.

Can you fall in love through a rifle scope?

Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.

The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children's blocks.

She was very easy to please, because she took joy in the smallest things, but exacting, too, because that small thing must be authentic, and wondrous in its small self, and not any kind of bullshit. She could detect bullshit from a hillside away. But then she took people at face value and expected the best of them until proven otherwise.

One of the things that happens to people as they get older, and especially to women on the other side of middle age, is that people forget to notice.

I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.

God, the names. You could almost walk into the words themselves." Now Jack put down his cup. He'd never heard anyone say that and it was true. For a moment he lost the blithe tempo of their conversation that had shielded him from his own shyness.

Paulson said there was a principle in aesthetics: the more you prettify something, the more you risk undermining its value. Its essential value.

You know just one cough, he says. That's what they said at the end. Not just through blood. Sharing bodily fluids. I'm not fucking a Mennonite. A cough is a bodily fluid. Land in your eye. Open your mouth to speak.

In my position with the first reports coming in I should have known. She sat up straight on her haunches and she cried silently.