“All the events of your past have formed a lens, or paradigm, through which you see the world. And since no one’s past is exactly like anyone else’s, no two people see alike.”
“for you to see beauty here
does not mean
there is beauty in me
it means there is beauty rooted
so deep within you
you can’t help but
see it everywhere”
“As for me: I loyally remained right where I was, remembering the first time I had ever seen the boy and then just now, the very last time—and all the times in between.”
“I stood in that room for a long time, watching the sunlight and listening to the sounds on the street outside. I stood there, tasting the room and the sunlight and the sounds, and thinking of the long hospital ward. . . Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life.”
“She waved at all the people on the train & later, when she saw they didn’t wave back, she started singing songs to herself & it went that way the whole day & she couldn’t remember having a better time in her life.”
“You know, my eyes ain’t too good at all. I can’t see nothing but the general shape of things, so I got to rely on my heart. Why don’t you go on and tell me everything about yourself, so as I can see you with my heart.”
“Seek and see all the marvels around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else. - Don Juan”
“It was the first time I had heard the truth of what happened that afternoon said in a voice that was not my own. Hearing what happened from Ann was like the difference between seeing your face in a mirror and seeing it in a photograph.”
“I’ve never fallen in love right off the bat. I get scared to say I love you too soon because it means so much. It means you’re not seeing an end to things.”
She was strong from endless hard work, and not old: She’d given birth to me before she was seventeen, and when she held me I could see we had the same skin, although in other ways we were not much alike she having broad, placid features, while mine, I’d been told (for we had no mirrors in the remote mountain village of Mino), were finer, like a hawk’s.
“How many times can you look at something and know that everyone around you is seeing the same thing or at the very least that their brains and eyes are responding to the same phenomenon? How much proof do you ever have that we’re all in the same world?”
“Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing.”
“When Wilbur sat on a chair with his eyes open, Winnie could see him. She could see his eyes, anyway. But when Wilbur closed his eyes and went to sleep. Winnie couldn’t see him at all. So she sat on him.”
“It is not enough to cry out, not sufficient to lay bare your woes and catalogue your needs; people have only to close their eyes and their ears, you cannot force them to see and to hear—or to answer your cries if they cannot and will not.”
“I was seeing something I didn’t understand and did not want to.
No I wasn’t. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.”
“Barney had a feeling, somewhere in his middle, that it was probably true about the ground giving way. But still, there was a difference between being told and seeing it happen.”
″...And for a fleeting instant, at the far end of a glade, she thought she saw a little white horse with flowing mane and tail, head raised, poised, halted in mid-flight, as though it had seen her and was glad.”
“I have heard men say that seeing is believing; but I should say that feeling is believing; for much as I had seen before, I never knew till now the utter misery of a cab-horse’s life.”