Quotes about Perception

Funny how you lose sight of some things and memory others.

The Morgans always seemed to be having a second conversation—an unheard dialogue right next to the one they spoke aloud.

She didn't even know she had a neck until Jude remarked on it, or that her smile was anything but the spreading of her lips until he saw it as a small miracle.

She heard it as though it were what language was made for

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

Unlike the English fogs he had known since he would walk, or those way north where he lived now, this one was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. . . There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.

But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.

the girl's face was as tight and mean as broccoli

At first the people in the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power. [...] Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.

Of all the wishes people had brought him—money, love, revenge—this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power.