Quotes about Perception

there's often more in silences than in what is actually said — in the lips pressed together, the head turned away, the quick sideways glance. The shoulders drawn up as if carrying a heavy weight.

Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

The aliens arrive. We like the part where we get saved. We like the part where we get destroyed. Why do those feel so similar? Either way, it's an end.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it.

Sometimes he gets high, on the pot that circulates as freely as cigarettes did once. He thinks he should be enjoying this experience more than he actually does.

Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

Then I remembered something I'd seen and hadn't noticed, at the time. It wasn't the army. It was some other army.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past