Quotes About Observation

If the portraitist Chuck Close cannot remember faces, the artist Stephen Wiltshire sees and remembers everything. Wiltshire has an eidetic, or photographic, memory. He can look at a cityscape or scene in London, New York, Rome, Dubai, or Tokyo just once, for twenty minutes or so, and later meticulously replicate what he has seen in every detail.

Leonardo was a doer. He painted, of course, but he also went into the mountains to examine rocks and fossils and to the tidal marshes to look at the wings and flying habits of dragonflies. He took apart machines to see how they worked and took apart humans to the same end. He recorded all of his discoveries in what amounted to about thirteen thousand pages of notes and drawings.

What's the point of doing anything if nobody's watching?

People will see whatever they want to see. Parallax.

Okay, you guys, look up here. Omar did something good readers do.

You have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it.

Pátzcuaro and in the shops that catered to them, and we couldn't read the signs above the storefronts as we passed them, so we peered in every window along the way to see what was inside.

It's a shame about her, isn't it? But when I see you with her, the two of you seem to be having actual conversations. Like real people.

Everybody could see when something was troubling Christine--the writers kept asking, 'What's wrong with her?' But she never came to me directly to say she wasn't happy. That was not her way.

the apt conclusion may be not that the universe is meaningless but that we have identified meaning with rational explanation. "Might it not be the case that the reason for existence has no explanation in the usual sense?" he asks-and then answers himself with a remarkable observation: "This does not mean that the universe is absurd or meaningless. Only that an understanding of its existence and properties lies outside the usual categories of rational human thought"5

If you want to predict a person's behavior, identify his or her incentives. Leo

Her heartbeat began to pound faster. Thirteen's eyes were sweeping over her body. A slow, deliberate glance. "Can he—can he see through the mirror?" His gaze felt like a hot touch on her skin. "Of course not" was Dr. Wyatt's instant response. The doc sounded annoyed with her. Her shoulders relaxed. Subject Thirteen smiled. Damn.

But, apparently, there was something else equally important that I did miss. My bad. Normally, my observational skills are way better than that." He drove his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. "So I have to ask… just when was it that you fell in love with me?

Héloïse noticed that his hair, of which a strand had escaped from under his wig, was fox-red, and that he had a boil on the back of his neck. It made him seem more human and less awe-inspiring, which was a comfort.

Miranda: You say you were my guardian angel. Does that mean you watched me all the time? Like when I got my period or doctored a zit or took a shower or- Zachary: I'm an angel, not a Peeping Tom.

Looking closer can make something beautiful.

Maybe when we see things all the time, we stop really looking at them. And it takes an artist, someone who can look past the ordinariness, to remind us how special they really are" -Lily

I think art can take ordinary things and show them to you like it's the first time you've ever seen them. And you realize that even ordinary things aren't really ordinary at all" -Salma

Looking close can make something beautiful. Not everything worth keeping has to be useful. If you don't have the words you need, borrow someone else's.

Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.

The more attention we pay to the idea that reality shifts, the more we see our reality shift

She spent a great deal of her time in an endeavour, becoming yearly more and more difficult in a world increasingly disturbed, to "place" people properly, and she was obviously overjoyed that in this case the task had been so easy, and the result so satisfactory.

If I had to tell what the world is for me I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole and place him in a theatre seat one evening and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout, would listen to what he says about the spotlights, sounds of the music, and movements of the dance.

Looks Like Tacoma Down There