Quotes about Perception

to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory...

I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist - mental concepts.

The vultures group themselves on the roof like pigeons: tiny moron head, long necks, faces like Carnival masks, and dusty plumages, peering this and that attentively for death.

I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It's easier to feel at home with a fat man.

In one great case a man [Winston Churchill] who had been considered too brilliant and too reckless ever to be trusted with major office was the leader of the country [1941]. One of Rowe's last memories was of hearing him hissed by ex-servicemen from the public gallery of a law court because he had told an abrupt unpalatable truth about an old campaign. Now he had taught the country to love his unpalatable truths.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap

To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour—the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

My dear, try to believe we exist when you aren't there. We're independent of you. None of us is like you fancy we are. Perhaps it wouldn't matter much if your thoughts were not so dark, always so dark.

Far too often, unbelievers know Christians only for what we stand against, not what we stand for.

In a community that gets life based on appearances, problems tend to be diagnosed in terms of how things appear.

Many people have trouble passionately loving and living for God because they have a mental picture of him that inspires anything but passion.

For we are only as healthy as our picture of God is accurate.