Quotes About Observation

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

Look down your shirt and spell attic.

There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hotpink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork. —David Foster Wallace, "Big Red Son" (1998)

He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and

learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemisis, Realism: if realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see.

I can remember watching large, tentative, individual flakes of snow falling and blowing around aimlessly in the wind generated by the train through the window of the CTA commuter line from Lincoln Park back up to Libertyville, and thinking, 'This is my crude approximation of a human life.

Jakob Hlasek is six foot two and built like a halfback, his blond hair in a short square Eastern European cut, with icy eyes and cheekbones out to here: He looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell and seems in general just way too scary ever to try to talk to. His backhand is a one-hander, rather like Ivan Lendl's, and watching him practice it is like watching a great artist casually sketch something. I keep having to remember to blink.

I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern.

He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away.

the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

David Foster Wallace

Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things?

This (the sunset) more resembled an explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it: it (the sunset) was swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light when he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall. It hung just above the peaks of the Tortolita foothills behind him (Marathe), and slowly was sinking.

David Foster Wallace

That—to cut to a chase which the interviewers' hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp's bulb with a much higher wattage signified they'd very much like to see cut to—as

Julie has told Faye that she believes lovers go through three different stages in getting really to know one another. First they exchange anecdotes and inclinations. Then each tells the other what she believes. Then each observes the relation between what the other says she believes and what she in fact does.

You just never quite occurred out there, kid.

and sipping hazelnut espresso and watching, on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the

It occurs to me that neither my aunt nor my uncle has once asked what happened to the pretty little thing that came visiting with us last time we were up, and I wonder what my mother has said to my aunt. I begin to be anxious about something I can neither locate nor define.

My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge's system of angled shadows. If no one is really the way we see them, that would include me, I said. And you. Rudy admired the sunset. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he was looking only at the water. I saw him.

My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge's system of angled shadow. Because if no one is really the way we see them, I said, that would include me. And you. Rudy admired the sunset out loud. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just slightly over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he'd been looking only at the water. I'd watched him.

Television," after all, literally means "seeing far";

It is hard to notice what you see every day.