Selective Awareness Quotes

There are lots of things we choose not to see. Doesn't mean they aren't there, even if we wish they weren't.

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.

We only see what we want to see; we only hear what we want to hear. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.

I'm always surprised when people say, "Oh, it got such mixed reviews." I guess I didn't read them.

Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.

The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out.

People only see what they want to see and sometimes you can't do anything about that, so you just pick up the baton and you just run with it.