Quotes About Observation

For so long I'd felt that what I'd been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating

I spent the rest of the morning observing the observer

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

In fact,I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it. The reason I don't trust Chinese surgeons is that I am afraid that when a Chinese surgeon cuts up my liver in search of a gall-stone, he may forget about the stone and put my liver in a frying pan.

Thank goodness my wedding shop is just across the street so I can watch the locals for signs of romance.

If you want to understand the life of a foreign city, how people go about their day-to-day business, what they buy and what they look like, go to the supermarket. I rarely have the need to purchase a box of breakfast cereal or a loaf of bread while abroad, but watching others do it tells me more about a place than being led around in a crocodile behind a tour guide's umbrella.

The art of reading is to know and understand the things which go unsaid.

The art of reading is to know and understand the things which go unsaid. There is as much to be learned from the spaces between, the empty lines, as there is from the words on the page. I

it's helpful to focus your child's attention on the present moment by deciding together on one thing you may particularly look for.

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

Physicians were never consulted for pregnancy, and Margaret knew that when she was confined for delivery, only women would be allowed to attend to her. As late as 1522, a German physician with insatiable curiosity dressed as a woman to observe a birth. His trespass was punished: he was burned to death.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

You could tell those two had been married by the way that she ignored him.

In my experience, men who sit in corners are the ones to watch.

Having achieved limited success under difficult circumstances (wrong boy, wrong mouth, sticky bus floor, lingering aroma of someone's forgotten banana, two girls--Miranda and Amy--not even bothering to pretend not to watch over the back of the next seat), Clementine felt adequately prepared for the real thing.

You just have to pay attention. If you don't, you'll miss them, or see something else--something you expected to see rather than what was really there. Faerie voices become just the wind, a bodach ... scurrying across the street becomes just a piece of litter caught in the backwash of a bus.

To listen to his subtle comments on events of the present was like listening to a gentleman from the Biedermeier period expressing opinions about a modern airplane factory.

Whether we liked it or not we were involuntary witnesses to every man's behaviour, to the way he walked, the way he ate, the way he slept, the way he washed, the way he put on his clothes. No one could hide anything from anybody.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

I had created my own Other Woman who happened to be a boy. I'd seen this in-house cuckolding in other families, and it's odd that I'd failed to spot it in ours.

The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there's more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species.

To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.

Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile.

I've found that people's generalizations are largely illuminating about themselves.