Quotes about Perception

She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup. as if there was an eddy--there--and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

But suppose Peter said to her, Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties? all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But

Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.

She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real; the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the noise of the waves--all this was real.

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours.

In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances

For the philosopher is right who says that nothing is thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy

There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision.

Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

How explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships?...

There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures neatly divided into the fractions of an inch that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter or fidelity of a sister or the capacity of a housekeeper.

Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.