Quotes About Observation

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

the two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia.

Writing is one-third imagination, one-third experience, and one third observation.

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

Luster returned, wearing a stiff new straw hat with a colored band and carrying a cloth cap. The hat seemed to isolate Luster's skull, in the beholder's eye as a spotlight would, in all its individual planes and angles. So peculiarly individual was its shape that at first glance the hat appeared to be on the head of someone standing immediately behind Luster.

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed. Then

Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group.

But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.

He had a face like a nutcracker; a scrawny man of no particular age, with merry secretive eyes.

dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.

I says to myself it's a good thing her eyes are giving out

looking out upon the whatever ogreworld of that quiet village street with the air of children born too late into their parents' lives and doomed to contemplate all human behavior through the complex and needless follies of adults

Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock.

When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.

era de esa clase de individuos a los que no se les ve a primera vista, aunque estén solos en el fondo de una piscina de cemento vacía

I've seed de first en de last, Dilsey said. I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.

Mrs Armstid does not rattle the stove now, though her back is still toward the younger woman. Then she turns. They look at one another, suddenly naked, watching one another; the young woman in the chair, with her neat hair and her inert hands upon her lap, and the older one beside the stove, turning motionless too, with a savage screw of gray hair at the base of her skull, and a face that might have been carved in sandstone. Then the younger one speaks.

as he strode on, moving almost as fast as a smaller man could have trotted, his body breasting the air her body had vacated, his eyes touching the objects—post and tree and field and house and hill—her eyes had lost.

I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.

Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.