Sharon Olds Quotes

The problem is that perception is reality.

You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it's not that way at all, it's something else.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

Our capacity for belief is so plastic, we can convince ourselves of anything. Believing is seeing.

I don't think I could tell the whole truth about anything. That's a pretty heavy burden, because we all just view the world through this little piece of coke bottle.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.

The blind see what they want to see.

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

For each believes his glimm'ering lamp to be the gorgeous light of day.

We can easily represent things as we wish them to be.

Very few people love others for what they are; rather, they love what they lend them, their own selves, their own idea of them.

We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.

People think that they see, but they don't.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

The majority of people have no understanding of the things with which they daily meet, nor, when instructed, do they have any right knowledge of them, although to themselves they seem to have.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates - a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it.

All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.