Quotes about Perception

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

He sat leaning forward in the seat with his elbows on the empty seatback in front of him and his chin on his forearms and he watched the play with great intensity. He'd notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not. There was nothing in it at all.

I think what is being pointed out is that human consciousness and reality are not the same thing.

In truth they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadnt drunk.

People think they know what they want but they generally dont. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways. People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things.

He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

The other thing is the old people, and I keep comin back to them. They look at me it's always a question. Years back I dont remember that. I dont remember it when I was sheriff back in the fifties. You see em and they dont even look confused. They just look crazy. That bothers me. It's like they woke up and they dont know how they got where they're at. Well, in a manner of speakin they dont.

He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them.

People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you.

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name.