Salient Quotes

“Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers—something red, something anomalous, something desirable—in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it.”

“A fleeting moment can become an eternity. From a past encounter everything may disappear in the dungeon of forgetfulness. A few furtive flashes or innocent twinkles can survive, though. Some immaterial details may remain marked in our memory, forever. A significant look, a salient colour or a unforeseen gesture may abide, indelibly engraved in our mind. ( "Girl in blue" )”

“Facts are never as salient as feelings.”

“If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.”

“To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.”

“No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.”

“[T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis.”

“We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now,’ without any postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.”

“We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent "here and now " without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.”