Quotes about Perception

Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or just characters in one of my novels.

He saw her before he saw anything else in the room.

What was it? Why won't you tell me? I don't want to break down your illusions. My dear man, I have no illusions about you. I mean illusions about yourself.

It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...

I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

You're not sentimental?' 'No, I'm romantic-- a sentimental person thinks things will last-- a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional.

An idea ran backward and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.

he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.