Quotes About Observation

What do you think about America? Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world.

That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him-he wasn't painting that bird from his mind, you know? That's a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw him mixed up with dozen other birds all the same kind, I could pick him out, no problem. And he's right. So could I. And if I could go back in time I'd clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted.

Joan Miró: You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

People don't pay attention to ninety percent of what they see.

A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.

By his own choice, he had so little contact with the outside world that he frequently considered the commonplace to be bizarre: an automatic-teller machine, for instance, or some new peculiarity in the supermarket—cereal shaped like vampires, or unrefrigerated yogurt sold in pop-top cans.

Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another?

Now searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.

Well, she doesn't have anything to do with it, Richard, you're just like that guy in 'Dragnet' that always wants the facts.

Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters—Vincent

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus.

aware that Allison's eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.

Then on the opposite page a different ad, for digital cameras, scrawled in artsy letters and signed Joan Miró: You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

Tormented by what was happening, yet unable to stop it, I hovered around and watched the apartment vanishing piece by piece, like a bee watching its hive being destroyed.

understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;

The days were so much alike I barely noticed the months pass.

It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods amd seasons was to see it a thousamd different ways

It has been said that some people go to church to eye the clothes and others go to close their eyes.

Blake Crouch, Chicago's deputy chief, and says, "I don't know." Crouch resembles a mole, with a long, sharp nose and tiny black eyes.

nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat pointed out that just because something is less noticed doesn't mean it's less important than things that are obvious: In the department of economy, an act,

Thudd pointed out the birds that flashed through the trees—screaming orange-and-green king parrots, black riflebirds that made a sound like a gunshot, and green catbirds that meowed.

The eye of God! Think of that. Everywhere, in every house, in every field, in every room, in every company, alone or in a crowd, the eye of God is always on you. "The eyes of the Lord are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good" (Proverbs 15:3), and they are eyes that read hearts as well as actions.