Quotes about Perception

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice?

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.

The only time Tol's clothes looked good was before he put them on.

Death is a sort of lens, thought I used to think of it as a wall or shut door. It changes things and makes them clear.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.

It was as though I knew without exactly knowing, or felt, or smelled in the air, the already accomplished fact that nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away.

They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.