Quotes About Observation

The woods is old enough to be fairly free of undergrowth. I go along slowly, watching for whatever may present itself.

One of the best days of the year, for me, was Decoration Day, when people would come from near and far with flowers to decorate the graves. Besides being beautiful and fragrant with all the roses and peonies and boughs of mock orange, it was a kind of grace and benediction, and a kind of homecoming. I liked to make a show of being busy in the graveyard so I could watch and listen.

I would be back in my garden all the time, working or just looking….I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.

Aunt Beulah could hear the dust motes collide in a sunbeam; she could hear spiders chewing on flies.

A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me; if I watched long enough, a bird or a cloud would appear within the frame, and I watched with patience.

Satyr," he says, "is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

A hunter, with a second hunter nearby, asked me what I was looking for up there. I said I liked his dog better than I liked him.

me fascinan las cajetillas de cigarrillos al borde del camino, sobretodo cuando no están estrujadas, entonces se hinchan ligeramente, adquieren cierto aspecto de cadáveres, los cantos ya no están tan definidos y el celofán se empaña desde dentro, es vapor condensado en gotitas de agua por el frío.

Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you'll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking — like great literature — must have experience of life at its foundation. Read Conrad or Hemingway and you can tell how much real life is in those books.

S___ likes being around other people; she just isn't particularly comfortable talking to them. She supposes that she is some variety of voyeur, enjoying the spectacle, breathing in the atmosphere, while experiencing uneasiness when asked to become part of it. None of this makes her unhappy. The life of a wallflower, she often thinks, is not such a terrible life.

Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn't exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you!--you have married a monster.

If you will look about you (which most people won't do), says Sergeant Cuff, you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business.

We often hear, almost invariably, however, from superficial observers, that guilt can look like innocence. I believe it to be infinitely the truer axiom of the two that innocence can look like guilt.

She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Never

Mr. Bruff, I'm ordered to take exercise and I don't like it. That, added Aunt Ablewhite, pointing out of window to an invalid going by in a chair on wheels, drawn by a man, is my idea of exercise. If it's air you want, you get it in your chair. And if it's fatique you want, I am sure it's fatiquing enough to look at the man.

A young man who plays his part in society by looking on in green spectacles, and listening with a sickly smile, may be a prodigy of intellect and a mine of virtue, but he is hardly, perhaps, the right sort of man to have at a picnic.

Now, Betteredge, exert those sharp wits of yours, and observe the conclusion to which the Colonel's instructions point! I instantly exerted my wits. They were of the slovenly English sort; and they consequently muddled it all

Observe, dear lady, what a light is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your heart, as it penetrates mine?

Persons and Things do turn up so vexatiously in this life, and will in a manner insist on being noticed.

the harder the struggle for existence among the men and women about us, the less the risk of their having the time or taking the pains to notice chance strangers who came among them.

Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey SAT through life.