Kerry James Marshall Quotes

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

How are things visible? Can you see an egg against a white background? Not by drawing a line around it can you make it evident.

We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?

We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

How odd, that light should prevent one from seeing.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

A SEEING eye is better than three hundred blind men's: The eye can distinguish pearls from pebbles.

One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog". The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog."

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

Sight is the noblest sense of man.

You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?

One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

In the dark, all cats are black.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

My wife went into the butchers and said: "You've a sheep's head in your window." The butcher said: "That's a mirror."

I still get scared at night. Every tiny creak, every little noise, I open my eyes real wide and listen with them. Have you noticed that? When it’s dark and you can’t see a thing, you open your eyes really wide and glance back and force, like your eyes become your ears?

Seeing-is-believing is a blind spot in man's vision.

I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.

One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would.