Quotes about Perception

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found it without it.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it. Even as a child, I noticed that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz spent her entire time trying to get back home to Kansas, and Alice in Wonderland dreamed her long adventure, then woke up just in time for tea.

A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

That's why male adults, and some females too, experience the presence of a strong woman as a dangerous regression to a time of their own vulnerability and dependence.

Women are always saying, "We can do anything that men can do." But men are not saying, "We can do anything that women can do.

Change seems recognizable only after it's happened, like putting one's foot down for a familiar stair—and it's not there.

It is said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I soon developed myopia and a firm belief that people in books were not only more interesting but more real than people outside of books.

one writerly habit was describing everything I did, no matter how absorbing or how trivial, as if I were standing outside myself and watching.