Quotes About Observation

Perhaps you never have time when are you alive? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others.

Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.

I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

But once, a cardinal alighted on the kitchen windowsill and he found himself squinting long after it had flown away again, trying hard to hold on to its beauty.

THING ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE," HIS FATHER WAS SAYING. They were driving along the Long Island Ex pressway, heading out to East Hampton. There was a house there his father wanted to look at for his next film. "They don't know they're white. They know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white." He shook his head and checked his rearview mirror. "It's strange.

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame - of everything.

Cats regard people as warm-blooded furniture.

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

Here, in a few words, you've said all you need to say. People stand by each other, but they don't talk. It's remarkable. I've investigated the extraordinary history of these walls. I think I'm the only person who knows that it's the stones, the stones alone that set the tone here.

I'd very much like to 'conclude' something from this experiment. Or that it should raise a question in my mind, and a commitment to get to the bottom of the matter, to investigate, to come up with an outline of the beginning of an answer, however ill-defined or trite it might be . . . But no. I'm here to see, hear, observe - to experience. Let others explain.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

ahorita me siento julieta aquí en el piso doce y tu mirándome desde el malecón infecto lleno de ratas, ay qué emoción, no cualquier día la hacen sentirse a una como julieta...

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamp-light. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

She smelled sometimes of lemons, sometimes of sage, sometimes of roses, sometimes of bay leaf. At times I would no longer hear what it was she was saying; I just liked to look at her mouth as it opened and closed over words, or as she laughed. How terrible it must be for all the people who had no one to love them so and no one whom they loved so, I thought.

A man came up the far side of the street, walking neither slow nor fast ,not turning his head, as he paused, and quite surely not noticing them; they watched him until he was out of sight, and Rufus felt, and was sure that his father felt, that though there was no harm in the man and he had as good a right as they did to be there, minding his own business, their journey was interrupted from the moment they first saw him until they saw him out of sight.

Children must not stare at their elders," he said. "That is ill-bred." "Huh?" both of them asked. What's "stare," they wondered; "elders"; "ill-bred"? "Say, 'Sir,' or 'I beg your pardon, Father.' " "Sir?" Rufus said. "You," Father Jackson said to Catherine. "Sir?" Catherine said. "You must not stare at people—look at them, as you are looking at me.

Now there was nothing to take their eyes from each other; and still, for some reason, they had nothing to say. They were not disturbed by this, but both felt almost the shyness of courtship.

and every time, he was still more acutely aware of their eyes on him and of the thoughts behind their eyes

Isn't every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn't there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

Big Angel had never noticed his mother's endowment before. Suddenly, she seemed to be blessed with an expanse of pillowy flesh. And she tucked the parrot into that cleavage, adjusting herself as it sank from view, finishing the operation by using her thumb on its head to get it well positioned in the shadows. She adjusted her bust and said, "Let's go to San Diego, boys!

The Art of Seeing. It is essential to an architect to know how to see: I mean, to see in such a way that the vision is not overpowered by rational analysis.

Don't ask me about this building or that one, don't look at what I do, see what I see.

Poeta é aquele cara que vem atrás pegando o que usamos todos os dias e jogamos fora, e quando você se vira vê uma catedral de tampinhas de garrafa.

Cuanto mejor era ser espectador de la gran farsa de la vida humana que desempeñar en ella un papel de actor, aunque fuera secundario! ¡Cuánto mejor ser libre que esclavo de un gran empeño que, como todos los grandes empeños, tarde o temprano acabaría por mostrar su condición ilusoria y estéril!