Perception and vision - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

The morphine had its customary effect - that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf - in the hue of a blade of grass - in the shape of a trefoil - in the humming of a bee - in the gleaming of a dew-drop - in the breathing of the wind - in the faint odors that came from the forest - there came a whole universe of suggestion - a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.

- Edgar Allan Poe, ''A Tale of the Ragged Mountains'' (1844)

The human mind delights in grand visions of supernatural beings.

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

Besotted Being! You think yourself the perfection of existence, while you are in reality the most imperfect and imbecile.

- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)

At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.

- H. G.Wells, TheWar of theWorlds (1898)

Spite of the infinite danger in which we were between starvation and a still more terrible death, we could yet struggle bitterly for that horrible privilege of sight.

- H. G.Wells, TheWar of theWorlds (1898)

Human heads are opaque, with only tiny windows in them - the eyes.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

The mind of man is not adjusted for a close observation of phenomena that belong to the cosmos.

- Edwin Balmer and PhilipWylie, WhenWorlds Collide (1932)

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

- Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar AllanWoolf, TheWizard of Oz (film, 1939)

''Sight,'' Metzger said, ''is the most highly civilized of the senses. It was the last to come. The other senses tie us in closely with the very roots of life; I think we perceive with them more keenly than we know. The things we realize through taste and smell and feeling stimulate directly, without a detour through the centers of conscious thought. You know how often a taste or odor will recall a memory to you so subtly you don't know exactly what caused it? We need those primitive senses to tie us in with nature and the race. [. . .] Sight is a cold, intellectual thing compared with the other senses.''

- C. L. Moore, ''NoWoman Born'' (1944)

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation - which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

- JohnWyndham, Out of the Deeps (1953)

Beneath lay the elevated station. There myriad experiences and lives jostled each other like waves. It was like the sea, which, seen from a mountaintop, appears calm. There is always order in the distant view.

- Kobo Abй, Inter Ice Age 4 (1959), translated by E. Dale Saunders (1970)

So-called common sense relies on programmed nonperception, concealment, or ridicule of everything that doesn't fit into the conventional nineteenth century vision of a world that can be explained down to the last detail.

- Stanislaw Lem, The Investigation (1959), translated by Adele Milch (1974)

The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.

- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961)

I saw myself, I saw both of us, from a long way off, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, and everything looked meaningless, trivial, and slightly ridiculous.

- Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961), translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (1970)

We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it.

- Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)

''Much of what you see in perceiving me - '' He pointed to himself for emphasis. '' - is a projection from your own mind. To another percept-system I would appear quite different. To the police, for instance. There're as many worldviews as there are sentient creatures.''

- Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)

''If you can see a thing whole,'' he said, ''it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.''

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

You can only perceive in terms of the impulses your own brain generates. Yet you fall into the trap of believing that you perceive reality.

- Thomas N. Scortia, ''The Armageddon Tapes - Tape 1'' (1974)

A star is a stone to the blind. She saw him through crippled eyes.

- Craig Strete, ''Time Deer'' (1974)

How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

- Douglas Adams, ''Fit the Twelfth,'' episode of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series, 1980)

I want you to learn to look behind the mask of events.

- Michael Swanwick, ''Ginungagap'' (1980)

In the tradition of young girls and windows, the young girl looks out of this one. It is difficult to see anything.

- Tanith Lee, ''Bite-Me-Not, or, Fleur de Fur'' (1984)

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

- Terry Pratchett, Pyramids (1989)

It does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century.

- Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See (1990)

There is a way of looking far into the distant past and seeing everything that happened there. The same method can be used to observe distant events while they are actually happening - and also, of course, events that took place both long ago and far away. It is even possible to spy upon what is occurring in the alternative universes - those parts of the polycosmos which, unreified in our own time-line, exist for us only as the sites of dreams.

- John Grant, TheWorld (1992)

Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they'd seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C . . . Theweird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell's class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities.

- William Gibson, Virtual Light (1993)

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. Then you accept it, or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors.

- J. Michael Straczynski, ''Chrysalis,'' episode of Babylon 5 (1994)