I am thing that thinks: that is, a things that doubts,affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions.
That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.
See with your ears and hear with your eyes.
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.
The human body is not the person. Identity is the way the brain operates; it's memories, it's sensory input and output. The mind is the person.
I cannot remember how I felt when the light went out of my eyes. I suppose I felt it was always night and perhaps I wondered why the day did not come.
Our fundamental relationship is soul-to-soul. As we become multi-sensory, we become aware of it.
The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.
I love everything soft, cashmere and down. I don't like anything scratchy.
I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.
It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.
The texture of experience is prior to everything else.
There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.
Taste, which enables us to distinguish all that has a flavor from that which is insipid.
You think about some of the most memorable meals you've ever had; the food will be good but it will often be about locating a mental memory and taste is inexorably linked to all the other senses and memory, so ultimately it is all about taste.
Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
I was still using my eyes even though I had them shut.
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
The world cannot be translated; It can only be dreamed of and touched.
I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face.
He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.
Getting to know someone in blind darkness changes your impression of them.
