Quotes about Perception

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it.

Sometimes he gets high, on the pot that circulates as freely as cigarettes did once. He thinks he should be enjoying this experience more than he actually does.

Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

Then I remembered something I'd seen and hadn't noticed, at the time. It wasn't the army. It was some other army.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past

But when you cross over the border, it is like passing through air, you wouldn't know you'd done it; as the trees on both sides of it are the same.

You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.

I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they're my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I'll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.