Quotes about Perception

Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do--they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it.

Then Nicole. Rosemary saw her suddenly in a new way and found her one of the most beautiful people she had ever known. Her face, the face of a saint, a viking Madonna, shone through the faint motes that snowed across the candlelight, drew down its flush from the wine-colored lanterns in the pine. She was still as still

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

It is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, (P. 1)

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual There!—yet

These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I'm this because of this or that because of that. —Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely to paint her, to set her down now, as she was, as, as with each relentless second she could never be again. What

He got the reputation for being a good musician because he drank so much that his friends had to explain him away somehow--

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.

Almost impersonally he was convinced that no woman he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria. She was deeply herself; she was immeasurably sincere—of these things he was certain. Beside her the two dozen schoolgirls and débutantes, young married women and waifs and strays whom he had known were so many females, in the word's most contemptuous sense, breeders and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of the cave and the nursery.