Quotes about Perception

The defeat that had frightened her in the faces of black men was the defeat of black forever defined by white.

Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. I am speaking here of man's mind. The men both worshiped and feared the women.

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone — a roofleaf or Christ — but we don't. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.

When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest.

But they know who Adam is from they own point of view. And for a whole lot longer time ago. And who that? Mr. ______ ast. The first man that was white. Not the first man. They say nobody so crazy they think they can say who was the first man. But everybody notice the first white man cause he was white.

so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times. That's why the bible says that Jesus Christ had hair like lamb's wool. Lamb's wool is not straight, Celie. It isn't even curly.

He had no such dreams, certainly. And if he had them, he did not recall them, on rising. Nor could he fathom why this should be so. In fact, dreams, the world of dreams, did not exist for him, as it existed for her. And unlike her, he did not sit before the dwindling fire of their hearth wondering, pondering, nagging the question really, What does this mean?

Or are they saying simply that they can not and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part, that has gone on, as far as they know, forever?

An American, I said, sighing, but understanding my love of my adopted country perhaps for the first time: an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me.

In Washington, D. C., a gaffe is when you tell the truth.