Quotes About Perception

Bad liars always think they're good at it. (quoting Michael Moynihan)

That's what I Am a Strange Loop is about," said Deborah. "It's about how we spend our lives self-referencing, over and over, in a kind of strange loop.

Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he," wrote Goebbels's aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.

A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: There's a pedophile! Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I'll tell you, it outweighed anything I'd ever done.' 'What had she done?' I ask. 'Shoplifting,' says Tam. There is silence.

maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder. I

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. "I

Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction, when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down, there's nobody there and the restaurant doesn't exist. The restaurant is a horrific, never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like and the person you might be sitting with.

In fact ever since I first learned about confirmation bias I've been seeing it everywhere. Everywhere.

Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances.

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age. "Look!" we're saying. "WE'RE normal! THIS is the average!" We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.

Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.

But amongst a group who hadn't read it an opinion was beginning to form

deciding that instant judgment was a more heroic stance than curiosity. When

I learned, the field of interest was a man from Wales who could recognize all his sheep as individuals but couldn't recognize human faces, not even his wife, not even himself in the mirror.

This is really clear to me now. Ever since, I've never felt as tepid of this place as other people do. Everything seems like a long, improbable afterlife.

we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.

the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped.

Trying to prove you're not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you're not mentally ill

They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us.

She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.

aplomb. I had managed to portray myself as a good Jew and

Yes, observing is one of my biggest assets," he said, "I always observe.

they saw how well behaved I was, and decided it meant I could only behave well in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad." I