Quotes About Observation

What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.

Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots.

I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter's inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.

Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.

Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.

Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows.

Billy couldn't recall ever having seen a blind man laugh

We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

This country is toilet-oriented.

It is just so interesting, he says at last. The colors and all. The colors and all.

Ses textes étaient des poèmes en prose, le genre de choses qu'écrivent les infirmières avant d'assister à leur première amputation.

Why try to describe it? It's enough to say that everything in our field of vision seems to exist in order to gather the light of this event.

He no longer describes the earth as a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep space. The earth is land and water, the dwelling place of mortal men, in elevated dictionary terms. He doesn't see it anymore (storm-spiralled, sea-bright, breathing heat and haze and colour) as an occasion for picturesque language, for easeful play or speculation.

People sense things that are invisible. But when something's staring you right in the face, that's when you miss it completely.

At first they said skin irritation and sweaty palms. But now they say nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath." "This is human nausea we're talking about. Not rats." "Not rats," he said. I gave him the binoculars. "Well it won't come this way." "How do you know?" he said. "I just know. It's perfectly calm and still today. And when there's a wind at this time of year, it blows that way, not this way.

Steffie said, "Can you see the feathery plume from the attic window?" "It's not a plume." "But will we have to leave our homes?

Me doy cuenta ahora de que el primer día apenas llegué a mirar. Creía estar mirando, pero solo estaba percibiendo un mero barrunto de lo que hay en estos cuadros. Ahora es cuando estoy empezando a mirar.

I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles.

They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

Vernon liked to hang around outside the house, waiting for garbagemen, telephone repairmen, the mail carrier, the afternoon news-boy. Someone to talk to about techniques and procedures. Sets of special methods. Routes, time spans, equipment. It tightened his grip on things, learning how work was done in areas outside his range.