Quotes about Perception

You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

All those paintings of women, in art galleries, surprised at private moments. Nymph Sleeping. Susanna and the Elders. Woman bathing, one foot in a tin tub - Renoir, or was it Degas? both, both women plump. Diana and her maidens, a moment before they catch the hunter's prying eyes. Never any paintings called Man Washing Socks in Sink.)

Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control.

He's a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

He was not a monster, to her ... How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

Aunt Lydia, you are too good," he will beam. Too good to be true, I will think. Too good for this earth. Good, be thou my evil.

Be a good girl, she said. I hope you'll be a good sister to Laura. I know you try to be. I nodded. I didn't know what to say. I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around? Surely my mother loved Laura more than she loved me.

Now it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as was once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by.