Quotes about Perception
She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.
— Barbara Kingsolver
I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.
— Barbara Kingsolver
I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.
— Barbara Kingsolver
I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.
— Barbara Kingsolver
When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
— Barbara Kingsolver
It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
— Barbara Kingsolver
With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history's broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can't live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation.
— Barbara Kingsolver
People love to believe in danger, as long as it's you in harm's way, and them saying bless your heart.
— Barbara Kingsolver
And then while we all still waited I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative truth but not its twin.
— Barbara Kingsolver