Quotes About Observation

See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life unseeing. I do that some days...I think it's easier to see when you're a kid. We're not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don't have those long to-do lists you guys have.

If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.

I'm just telling you to live in [the world]. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...

Dolphins, I learned from J. Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate. Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.

She never puts on any weight, you'll notice that's often true of selfish women.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco's dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light.

the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in you eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as "anecdotal".

careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside.

I WAS trained to distrust other people's versions, but we go with what we have. We triangulate the coverage. Handicap for bias. Figure in leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation. Consider what filter is on the lens. So to speak.

What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.

When I was a girl, the crows knew when I was on my way to chase them from the fields, and how long I'd stay once I got there. They would bide their time, keeping me in sight until I'd completed my rounds. Then they'd descend on our fields. But their feet limit them from eating foods with hard shells. They are nowhere near as dexterous, or as smart, as parrots.

No one looks at us. We might as well be invisible; or clothing marks us as strangers, transients. They are polite, so polite; no one stares at us.

Gli abitanti di Lansquenet hanno imparato l'arte di osservare senza incrociare i suoi occhi. Sento il loro sguardo come un respiro sulla nuca, stranamente privo di ostilità, e tuttavia freddo. Per loro siamo una curiosità, parte del carnevale, una ventata che viene da terre lontane.

It is sometimes said that we should never believe a scientific theory until it is verified by experiment. But a famous astronomer has also stated that we should never believe an observation until it is confirmed by a theory.

He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched her facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore read Tiger Lily better than anyone else.

Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.