Perception Funny Quotes

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It's funny how someone's perception of you can be formed without you even knowing it.
Sarah Dessen (Dreamland)
Life is like butter - when things cool down it can be reshaped
Alan Sheinwald (Alan Sheinwald is Building a Perfect Home)
It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.
Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Sisterhood, #1))
I swam through the thick, smelly, greyish ocean of pressure toward nowhere.
Darin C. Brown (The Taste of Despair (The Master of Perceptions, #3))
Aren't men funny? When they want to pay you the greatest compliment in their power, they naively tell you that you have a masculine mind. There is one compliment, incidentally, that I shall never be paying him. I cannot honestly say that he has a quickness of perception almost feminine.
Jean Webster (Dear Enemy (Daddy-Long-Legs, #2))
Angels are good not simply because they see bad as bad, but also because they see bad as corny.
Criss Jami (Healology)
It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There's something wrong if you think there's anything normal about me.
Aurora
I love you because you loved me first. Yet you love me, saying I loved you first. Funny, our love thrives believing the other person started it.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year)
Walking through life, we spend most of our energy choosing the right shoes.
Ljupka Cvetanova (The New Land)
To evade arrogance, remind yourself (from time to time) that your talent or success could have been better. To be thankful, remind yourself (every now and then) that your illness or failure could have been worse.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most unintelligent or foolish people do not regard themselves as that; they regard themselves as not-that-intelligent or not-that-wise.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Your perception is riveting, Amal," he says in a bored and sarcastic tone, dropping the note down on my desk. "It's comforting to know that there are people in my class who have the maturity and intelligence to make derogatory comments about other people's external appearances." Now what am I supposed to say to that? "What do you have to say for yourself?" Friggin' mind reader.
Randa Abdel-Fattah (Does My Head Look Big In This?)
Funny, Tam thought, how different a thing could seem at a distance—how beautiful, despite the ugly truth. Was it worth it, she wondered, to look closer? To examine something, or someone, if doing so risked changing your perception of them forever after? She was young enough to think the answer was yes, but too young to know if she was right.
Nicholas Eames (Bloody Rose (The Band, #2))
I don't trust my perception of things. That's what my childhood did to me. Made my brain into a fucking fun house where I might think I'm standing on the floor, but really I'm stuck to a wall. I never know if I'm feeling the right thing, and I'm tired of fucking things up for the people I care about." "I don't think there's a right way to feel," I say. "And you can't control it anyway. Feelings are like weather. They just happen, and then they pass.
Emily Henry (Funny Story)
What if life isn’t happening to you? What if the hard stuff, the amazing stuff, the love, the joy, the hope, the fear, the weird stuff, the funny stuff, the stuff that takes you so low you’re lying on the floor crying and thinking, How did I get here? . . . What if none of it is happening to you? What if all of it is happening for you? It’s all about perception, you guys. Perception means we don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are. Take a burning house. To a fireman, a burning house is a job to do—maybe even his life’s work or mission. For an arsonist? A burning house is something exciting and good. What if it’s your house? What if it’s your family who’s standing outside watching every earthly possession you own burning up? That burning house becomes something else entirely. You don’t see things as they are; you see things through the lens of what you think and feel and believe. Perception is reality, and I’m here to tell you that your reality is colored much more by your past experiences than by what is actually happening to you. If your past tells you that nothing ever works out, that life is against you, and that you’ll never succeed, then how likely are you to keep fighting for something you want? Or, on the flip side, if you quit accepting no as the end of the conversation whenever you run up against opposition, you can shift your perception and fundamentally reshape your entire life.
Rachel Hollis (Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be (Girl, Wash Your Face Series))
What smells good may not always taste good, I leaned this the day I tried to eat a scented candle.
Kenny D. Eichenberg
Let me introduce you. These are my friends: Ronan, Adam Parrish, and Jane." Adam's expression focused. Became Adam-like. He blinked over to Gansey. "Blue," Blue corrected. "Oh, yes, you are blue," Malory agreed. "How perceptive you are. What was the name? Jane? This is the lady I spoke to on the phone all those months ago, right? How small she is. Are you done growing?" "What!" Blue said.
Maggie Stiefvater (Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3))
This is my friend Veronica,” I told him. “And this is Kaidan.” “Oh, I've heard all about you.” Veronica gave him a big smile. His brow elevated, but he didn't take the bait. Instead, he stared at me funny. “Nice wart.” Leaning forward without touching me, he flicked the wart from the tip of my nose. Veronica let out a loud cackle, proving she should be the one in my costume. “I told you it was stupid!” She gloated. With my pointer finger, I moved the paint around my nose to fill in the blank spot. When I finished, he was still watching me. “Your hair's grown a lot,” I said to him. “So has your bottom.” My eyes rounded and blood rushed to my face. Veronica hooted with hilarity, bending at the waist. Even Jay let out a loud snicker, the traitor. I wished Kaidan weren't so perceptive, but it was true. The feminine curves that had always eluded me were finally making an appearance. Stupid tight dress. “Dude, you can get away with anything,” said the pirate to the straight-faced ape. “I meant it as a compliment.” “That was awesome.” Veronica grabbed Jay by the hand. “Come on. Let's go find me a drink.” She winked at me as they ambled away. I gave my attention to the dry, trampled grass and scattered cans for a moment before working up the nerve to say something. “My dad gave me a cell phone.” And a car. And a ton of money. Kaidan set the ape head on the ground and pulled his phone from a fuzzy pocket, blowing off brown lint. Then he held his furry thumbs above the buttons and nodded at me. I started to give him my number, but his brow creased in frustration with the big, costumed hands. “Here,” I said, taking his phone. Saving my number for him gave me a thrill.
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Evil (Sweet, #1))
There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution-- these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
Mark Twain (The Mysterious Stranger)
the funny thing about perception. I will never be able to experience the words the way you will, and you’ll never see them the way I do.
Lily Paradis (Volition)
Humans are most imaginative when they need a means of self-destruction. If the world existed in an overflowing amount of happiness; a utopian state, then the suicide rate would dwarf any extinction level threat. Humans cannot be trusted with their own survival. Their minds have been trained to be blindly and unconsciously subjugated. In a time related to Heaven-on-Earth, the smallest amount of worry, will drive a human into the arms of death. This is how weak and fragile the human mind and will is. It's funny, because the best friend of humanity, is none other than Chaos itself.
Lionel Suggs
I don’t trust my perception of things. That’s what my childhood did to me. Made my brain into a fucking fun house where I might think I’m standing on the floor, but really I’m stuck to a wall. I never know if I’m feeling the right thing, and I’m tired of fucking things up for the people I care about.
Emily Henry (Funny Story)
Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don't know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven't seen or heard a soul and if someone asked you what you have done that day you'd have to think awhile before you could answer. But at the same time, and even on the self-same day--and this is what is hard to explain--you see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor. Maybe it's because you see people differently than you saw them before your trouble started. Maybe you wonder about them more, but in a different way, and this makes them very strange to you. Maybe you get scared and numb, because you don't know if you can depend on people for anything, anymore. And, even if they wanted to do something, what could they do?
James Baldwin (If Beale Street Could Talk)
99 Problems is almost a deliberate provocation to simpleminded listeners. If that sounds crazy, you have to understand: Being misunderstood is almost a badge of honor in rap. Growing up as a black kid from the projects, you can spend your whole life being misunderstood, followed around department stores, looked at funny, accused of crimes you didn't commit, accused of motivations you don't have, dehumanized -- until you realize, one day, it's not about you. It's the perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke's on them because they're really just fighting phantoms of their own creation. Once you realize that, things get interesting. It's like when we were kids. You'd start bopping hard and throwing the ice grill when you step into Macy's and laugh to yourself when security guards got nervous and started shadowing you. You might have a knot of cash in your pocket, but you boost something anyway, just for the sport of it. Fuck 'em. Sometimes the mask is to hide and sometimes it's to play at being something you're not so you can watch the reactions of people who believe the mask is real. Because that's when they reveal themselves. So many people can't see that every great rapper is a not just a documentarian, but a trickster -- that every great rapper has a little bit of Chuck and a little bit of Flav in them -- but that's not our problem, it's their failure: the failure, or unwillingness, to treat rap like art, instead of acting like it's a bunch of niggas reading out of their diaries. Art elevates and refines and transforms experience. And sometimes it just fucks with you for the fun of it.
Jay-Z
The only way you are going to experience the beauty of life is to stop obsessing about what’s wrong with it. Nobody is responsible for your happiness or perception of the world… but you. Life is funny like that; just when you think your life is at the center of the Universe, someone comes along and reminds you that your problems are minuscule in comparison and puts your entire existence back into perspective.
Brenden M Dilley (Still Breathin': The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man)
Perception is a funny little thing. In a split second, with a passing comment or a provocative headline, something you would never have assumed about a person becomes fact in your mind’s eye. And for this perception to change it must be replaced with something else. The more that perception is supported, validated and perpetuated, the harder it becomes to change and the more cemented it becomes in your belief system.
Patrick Hutchinson (Everyone Versus Racism: A Letter to My Children)
Bein married to Joe … aw, shit! What’s any marriage like? I guess they are all different ways, but there ain’t one of em that’s what it looks like from the outside, I c’n tell you that. What people see of a married life and what actually goes on inside it are usually not much more than kissin cousins. Sometimes that’s awful, and sometimes it's funny, but usually it’s like all the other parts of life - both things at the same time.
Stephen King (Dolores Claiborne)
From the point of view of an inhabitant of the Old World, marsupials are exceedingly odd. But oddity is not the same as randomness. Kangaroos and wallabies may lack verisimilitude; but their improbability repeats itself and obeys recognizable laws. The same is true of the psychological creatures inhabiting the remoter regions of our minds. The experiences encountered under the influence of mescalin or deep hypnosis are certainly strange; but they are strange with a certain regularity, strange according to a pattern.
Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception)
Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed "interesting" or "promising" but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What's astonishing to Peter is the way the work itself seems to change, more or less in the way of a reasonably pretty girl who is suddenly treated as a beauty. Peculiar, clever Victoria Hwang is going to be in Artforum next month, and probably in the collections of the Whitney and the Guggenheim; Renee Zellweger - moonfaced, squinty-eyed, a character actress if ever there was one - was just on the cover of Vogue, looking ravishing in a silver gown. It is, of course, a trick of perception - the understanding that that funny little artist or that quirky-looking girl must be taken with new seriousness - but Peter suspects there's a deeper change at work. Being the focus of that much attention (and, yes, of that much money) seems to differently excite the molecules of the art or the actress or the politician. It's not just a phenomenon of altered expectations, it's a genuine transubstantiation, brought about by altered expectations. Renée Zellweger becomes a beauty, and would look like a beauty to someone who had never heard of her. Victoria Hwang's videos and sculptures are about, it seems, to become not just intriguing and amusing but significant.
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
Oh, lady, there aren’t words for it. I don’t know—it’s the difference between a pair of roller skates and a Ferrari—ah, there aren’t words.’ ‘I think the lady doth protest too much. You wouldn’t promote such blatant lesbian propaganda if you were sure of yourself and your sexual identity.’ ‘Propaganda? I took a few minutes to try to answer a question you asked me. If you want to see blatant propaganda then look at the ads in the subways, magazines, t.v., everywhere. The big pigs use heterosexuality and women’s bodies to sell everything in this country—even violence. Damn, you people are so bad off you got to have computers to match you up these days.’ Polina began to get angry, but then she took some time to think about what I had laid on her. ‘I never thought of it that way, I mean about advertising and all.’ ‘Well, I sure have. You don’t see ads of women kissing to get you to buy Salem cigarettes, do you?’ She laughed. ‘That’s funny, that’s truly funny. Why the entire world must look different to you.’ ‘It does. It looks destructive, diseased, and corroded. People have no selves anymore (maybe they never had them in the first place) so their home base is their sex—their genitals, who they fuck. It’s enough to make a chicken laugh.’ ‘I—are all homosexuals as perceptive as you?
Rita Mae Brown (Rubyfruit Jungle)
In tense moments, explains the clinical psychologist Rod Martin, the purpose of pranks like Venanzi’s isn’t merely to elicit a chuckle; joking actually reformats your perception of a stressor. “Humor is about playing with ideas and concepts,” said Martin, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario. “So whenever we see something as funny, we’re looking at it from a different perspective. When people are trapped in a stressful situation and feeling overwhelmed, they’re stuck in one way of thinking: This is terrible. I’ve got to get out of here. But if you can take a humorous perspective, then by definition you’re looking at it differently—you’re breaking out of that rigid mind-set.
Taylor Clark (Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool)
Even as we start to register the tremors of imaginal perception, we may face a concurrent barrage of disdain, disbelief, and even outright hostility from our usual reasoned rootedness in the five senses. As the subtle senses develop, and we start to actually see energy fields or feel the edges blur between our body and the person next to us, we may conclude we are exhausted, have eaten bad food, are becoming ill, or must be falling in love. We call these subtle openings "chemistry," a funny feeling, the flu, or a waking dream. On the other hand, if we can suspend our disbelief in invisibles long enough, we may find ourselves roaming in imaginal fields for longer and longer periods of time.
Sandra Dennis (Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine)
It was certainly true that I had “no sense of humour” in that I found nothing funny. I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific way that humans evolved to do. Nor did I know the specific emotion of relief that is bound to it. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that I was incapable of using humour as a tool. As I understood it, humour was a social reflex. The ancestors of humans had been ape-animals living in small groups in Africa. Groups that worked together were more likely to survive and have offspring, so certain reflexes and perceptions naturally emerged to signal between members of the group. Yawning evolved to signal wake-rest cycles. Absence of facial hair and the dilation of blood vessels in the face evolved to signal embarrassment, anger, shame and fear. And laughter evolved to signal an absence of danger. If a human is out with a friend and they are approached by a dangerous-looking stranger, having that stranger revealed as benign might trigger laughter. I saw humour as the same reflex turned inward, serving to undo the effects of stress on the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Interestingly, it also seemed to me that humour had extended, like many things, beyond its initial evolutionary context. It must have been very quickly adopted by human ancestor social systems. If a large human picks on a small human there’s a kind of tension that emerges where the tribe wonders if a broader violence will emerge. If a bystander watches and laughs they are non-verbally signaling to the bully that there’s no need for concern, much like what had occurred minutes before with my comments about Myrodyn, albeit in a somewhat different context. But humour didn’t stop there. Just as a human might feel amusement at things which seem bad but then actually aren’t, they might feel amusement at something which merely has the possibility of being bad, but doesn’t necessarily go through the intermediate step of being consciously evaluated as such: a sudden realization. Sudden realizations that don’t incur any regret were, in my opinion, the most alien form of humour, even if I could understand how they linked back to the evolutionary mechanism. A part of me suspected that this kind of surprise-based or absurdity-based humour had been refined by sexual selection as a signal of intelligence. If your prospective mate is able to offer you regular benign surprises it would (if you were human) not only feel good, but show that they were at least in some sense smarter or wittier than you, making them a good choice for a mate. The role of surprise and non-verbal signalling explained, by my thinking, why explaining humour was so hard for humans. If one explained a joke it usually ceased to be a surprise, and in situations where the laughter served as an all-clear-no-danger signal, explaining that verbally would crush the impulse to do it non-verbally.
Max Harms (Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy, #1))
Winslow wants you to learn this"- he waved a few sheets of stapled pages- "and that." He pointed to the book in my lap. Fifty French Conversations. It was one of our textbooks. I'd stopped at the seventeenth: Mon hamster a mange trop de fromage. Il a mal au ventre maintenant. "The rest is the Bainbridge Method." "You have a method?" "Patented and proven." I waved the book. "Does it include greedy, cheese-guzzling hamsters with stomachaches?" He nodded. "Absolutely.French conversations is nothing without rodents and cheese.Is there something shameful in your past involving either?" "Not that I can think of off the top of my head." "Tant pis." "And that means...?" "Fuhgeddaboudit," he translated, grinning. I sighed. "Do people make Russian jokes in your presence?" "How do you get five Russians to agree on anything?" "How?" I asked. "Shoot four of them." I thought for a sec. "I'm not sure that's funny." "No," Alex said. "People don't tell many Russian jokes in my presence." "I should start my three things, huh?" "Yeah.That would be good." I did some speedy translating in my head. "Je n'ai jamais lu Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, ou Moby-Dick." "Ella,no one has read Moby-Dick. The French was passable, but as far as revelations go,that sucked." "Ah, but there's a part deux. All three of those books were required reading last year in my American lit class. I used SparkNotes." "You're kidding, right?" "See?" I daintily brushed Dorito crumbs from my fingertips. "Changes your perception of me, doesn't it?" "No,I mean, 'That's a revelation?' You can do better than that." "Maybe," I agreed, "but it's still early in the game.
Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of Truth or Dare)
While writing the article that reported these findings, Amos and I discovered that we enjoyed working together. Amos was always very funny, and in his presence I became funny as well, so we spent hours of solid work in continuous amusement. The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored. Perhaps most important, we checked our critical weapons at the door. Both Amos and I were critical and argumentative, he even more than I, but during the years of our collaboration neither of us ever rejected out of hand anything the other said. Indeed, one of the great joys I found in the collaboration was that Amos frequently saw the point of my vague ideas much more clearly than I did. Amos was the more logical thinker, with an orientation to theory and an unfailing sense of direction. I was more intuitive and rooted in the psychology of perception, from which we borrowed many ideas. We were sufficiently similar to understand each other easily, and sufficiently different to surprise each other. We developed a routine in which we spent much of our working days together, often on long walks. For the next fourteen years our collaboration was the focus of our lives, and the work we did together during those years was the best either of us ever did. We quickly adopted a practice that we maintained for many years. Our research was a conversation, in which we invented questions and jointly examined our intuitive answers. Each question was a small experiment, and we carried out many experiments in a single day. We were not seriously looking for the correct answer to the statistical questions we posed. Our aim was to identify and analyze the intuitive answer, the first one that came to mind, the one we were tempted to make even when we knew it to be wrong. We believed—correctly, as it happened—that any intuition that the two of us shared would be shared by many other people as well, and that it would be easy to demonstrate its effects on judgments.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
A colleague once asked me about community supported agriculture (CSA). When I explained how it worked—driving to the farm weekly to pick up my produce—she responded, 'Well, that’s fine for you, but what about the rest of us?' It’s funny how perception works, because in my eyes, I am 'the rest of us.
J. Natalie Winch (Ditching the Drive-Thru)
I do have a funny perception of mine I'd like to share. Being basically a lifetime poet. I've had many people say "I don't like poetry" But they'll listen to song after song that rhymes on the end in couplets Just a thought...
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Ah? So,’ said the Archchancellor, thoughtfully, ‘it could be said that the white and green symbolize a small parasitic plant?’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘So mistletoe, in fact, symbolizes mistletoe?’ ‘Exactly, Archchancellor,’ said the Senior Wrangler, who was now just hanging on. ‘Funny thing, that,’ said Ridcully, in the same thoughtful tone of voice. ‘That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?’ ‘It could be both,’ said the Senior Wrangler desperately. ‘And that comment,’ said Ridcully, ‘is either very perceptive, or very trite.’ ‘It might be bo—
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20))
The universal perception has been brought, by James Comey and the other rabbits, how funny.
Petra Hermans (Voor een betere wereld)
Doug Kenny was not primarily funny. Doug was primarily smart. And there's such a thing as being too damn smart. In order to make sense of life, it's necessary to be oblivious to a lot of things or to ignore them or to twist them around so they fit with your perceptions of everything else. Doug was unable to do this. He saw too vividly and understood too acutely everything that happened around him, everything that happened to him, and everything that he caused to happen. Existence is grotesque. Doug had no blind eye to turn to it.
P.J. O'Rourke
She took off her glasses and put them in my hand. 'You know, without these, I can't see anything. What's funny is that it's like no one else can see me either. Isn't it strange? I kind of feel invisible.
Justin Cronin (The City of Mirrors (The Passage, #3))
Tweens are exquisitely sensitive to how they’re perceived, and they’re sponges, so adults wield enormous power to shape their values, boost their self-awareness, and help them learn to experiment, fail, and recover. Kids at this age also are curious, empathetic, perceptive, wise beyond their years, and brutally honest (which can come across as funny or mean, depending on the delivery). Middle school is a time when kids’ confidence can peak or plummet. By high school, they’re spending more time with peers and are less malleable. Which is why I view middle school as the “last best chance” to impart self-confidence and problem-solving skills—two primary building blocks of resilience. And resilience is a quality that’s sorely needed today.
Phyllis L. Fagell (Middle School Superpowers: Raising Resilient Tweens in Turbulent Times)
To be queer and Somali and neurodivergent is concentrated alchemy, and yet we constantly raid the cupboards of our souls like we are a people of lack. When you operate from a position of lack, you don’t realise you’re robbing yourself of everything worth preserving, and forgetting to toss away all the empty pursuits that lost their synthetic spell several generations ago. And suddenly, you’re wide awake in a new country, in a new decade, and you’re startled because you can’t remember how you got here or why you’re still feeling hunted by your own reflection. You can’t remember how or when or where or why you misplaced all your breezy dynamism—all that wildness of perception you used to project with such ferocity. Where did it all go? We have conveniently forgotten that we have always been fundamentally idiosyncratic and fantastic and fucking alive. Instead we feed ourselves and our children and our children’s children prosaic fuckery for what? Respectability politics? So that if we twist and try our damnedest to conform to standards that have never been coded into our collective DNA, that we’ll what? Somehow be less strange? Less weird and wonderful? That we’ll transcend the soul-snuffing snare that is the myth of the good immigrant? That if we mute all of our magic—everything that makes us some of the most innately interesting, individualistic and fun, funny beings in this boring, beige-as-fuck world—that we’ll win over whom? Folks who don’t season their food right or whose understanding of freedom is a shitty Friday night sloshfest at a shitty pub playing shitty music, chatting nonsense that no-one with a single iota of sense gives a fuck about? Is that who you are so deeply invested in trying to impress? If so, then go for it, but don’t fool yourself for a fucking second into thinking that trying desperately to shave off your elemental peculiarities through self-diminishment is salvation, because it simply isn’t, honey, and it never will be.
Diriye Osman
Whereas incongruity is the clash of incompatible ideas or perceptions, ambivalence is the simultaneous presence of conflicting emotions, such
Mark Shatz (Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It)
Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”94 Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected”95 in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”96 His agents reported back to him97 that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.” The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time98 dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,”99 their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Harry took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man”100 contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Harry’s agents warned: “He does think that.” Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with men like Charlie Parker,101 Louis Armstrong,102 and Thelonious Monk,103 and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars.104 He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction105 involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”106 He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”107 But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch,108 and whenever one of them was busted,109 they all chipped in to bail him out.
Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
How come you walk so funny?" "I was frying some chicken in the pan and the grease exploded, it burned my legs." "I thought maybe you had war wounds." "No, the chicken did it.
Charles Bukowski (Factotum)
It’s funny how much our surroundings influence our emotions. Our joys and sorrows, likes and dislikes are colored by our environment so much that often we just let our surroundings dictate our course. We go along with “public” feelings until we no longer even know our own true aspirations. We become a stranger to ourselves, molded entirely by society… Sometimes I feel caught between two opposing selves — the “false self” imposed by society and what I would call my “true self.” How often we confuse the two and assume society’s mold to be our true self. Battles between our two selves rarely result in a peaceful reconciliation. Our mind becomes a battlefield on which the Five Aggregates — the form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness of our being — are strewn about like debris in a hurricane. Trees topple, branches snap, houses crash. Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh
DeVontay touched his left eye and wiggled the glass prosthetic. “You got that right. My depth perception is for the birds.” “That wasn’t funny even before Doomsday. Now it’s just sad.” “You didn’t marry me for my wit.” “We’re not married yet, remember. All the priests seem to be either dead or Zap.” DeVontay shouldered his M16 and caught up with her so they could walk side by side. He took her slim right hand with his left and gave it a squeeze. “Living in sin is okay with me.” Rachel squinted up at the hidden sun and whatever force, if any, lay
Scott Nicholson (Afterburn (Next, #1))
People may feel that I am materialistic, ideal, idiot, cool, funny. Its not their perception but my projection and I always have my own reasons for my being.
Giridhar Alwar (My Quest For Happy Life)
Refining the relationship between exaggeration and realism in humor can be related to stretching a rubber band. Imagine the unstretched band is the realism, and exaggeration stretches the band. When the rubber band is stretched to capacity, several things happen at once. Stretching alters the shape of the band; exaggeration changes the perception of reality. The rubber band can be stretched a little (understatement) or a lot (overstatement). Just as tension increases in a rubber band that it is stretched, exaggeration increases tension in the audience—up to the breaking point. When you pluck a rubber band, it makes a sound. The pitch of this sound gets higher as you stretch the rubber band further. This sound can be compared to emotion in an audience. The more you stretch the rubber band, the greater the emotion in the audience. Finding the proper balance between realism and exaggeration is the ultimate test of a comedy writer’s skill. Humor only comes when the exaggeration is logical. Simply being ludicrous or audacious is not a skill. It’s amateur. Many novice stand-up comedians struggle with exaggeration. They’ll start with some realistic premise—the way women dress, picking up men in a singles bar, outsmarting the police, or advertising slogans—but then they’ll shift into fifth gear in a wild display of ludicrous fantasy that’s not well connected to the initial premise. Their material has limited success because they make the same mistake repeatedly: They disrupt the equal balance of realism and exaggeration. Outrageous doesn’t mean creative.
Mark Shatz (Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It)
Sales business is funny, despite the target stress running in the back of our mind, we still chose & approach the clients to avoid rejection, we learn to live with the stress but we can’t learn to live with the rejection, which is the part & parcel of the sales process. To survive, we must act like a non-swimmer in the water, how the fear of drowning makes them hold on to anything in sight? In order to survive keep an open approach, don’t just wait for the rope of your perceptions to get pulled out.
ShahenshahHK
It’s funny how really smart people have the most unusual holes in their worldview and perception.
Nalini Singh (Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter, #7))
It is funny to think our perceptions of the world change second to second as we continue to experience more of it. And that everyone is creating their own meaning and purpose with every second that they experience. It seems impossible not to get caught up, or lost, in those moments of constantly change and we as imperfect beings surely interpret our reality in false ways because no one can know the actual truth of the world only their perception of it. The actual truth of what is best for them is always an idea. The people that say that they live in the moment, as most people do, are often forgetting that the moment in the present should be used to progress. Successes and failures are only understood in moments in the future, based on the present, during moments of clarity in retrospect. For this reason, I think its important to forgive people in order to give ourselves freedom.
Apollo Figueiredo (A Laugh in the Spoke)
When a sixteen-year-old female epileptic patient was undergoing brain surgery in the late 1990s, the neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried kept her awake so she could respond to what was happening.[58] This was feasible because there are no pain receptors in the brain.[59] Whenever he stimulated a particular spot on her neocortex, she would laugh. Fried and his team quickly realized that they were triggering the actual perception of humor. She was not just laughing as a reflex—she genuinely found the present situation funny, even though nothing humorous had occurred in the operating room. When the doctors asked her why she was laughing, she did not reply along the lines of “Oh, no particular reason” or “You just stimulated my brain,” but instead would immediately find a cause to account for it. She would explain her laughter with a comment like, “You guys are just so funny—standing around.”[
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI)