Quotes About Observation

When I say "hope", I don't mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean it's worth it to keep one's eyes open.

or stays up all night watching colored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry.

think you overestimate the maturity of adults, he wrote me in his final letter, a letter he sent only after I'd broken down and written him first, after a year of silence. Angry and hurt as I may have been by his departure, his observation was undeniably correct. This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn't necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.

The people who applaud the loudest, Lucrezia notes, are the ones who talked through the performance.

Two women in a room. One seated, one standing

She had the strange and unaccustomed sensation of having been observed and, perhaps, understood. How odd it was that the person who seemed to comprehend her, to see into her very soul, should be a man who had glimpsed her only once.

Qué curioso, piensa ella, tener a otro tan cerca: la escala desbordante de las pestañas, de los párpados cerrados, del pelo de la frente, todo mirando hacia el mismo sitio.

To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.

The grandmother was waiting in the parlour. She had on a long black skirt that reached to the ground and she moved as if she was on wheels. Esme doesn't think she ever saw her feet. She proffered a cheek for her son to kiss, then surveyed Esme and Kitty through pince-nez. 'Ishbel,' she said to their mother, who was suddenly standing very erect and very alert on the hearthrug, 'something will have to be done about the clothes.

She sees the girl, Iris, sitting with her legs crossed at the table, and it strikes Esme as odd that she herself had been sitting there too, just a moment ago. She sees the chair that had been hers—that is still hers. It is angled away from the table and there is her plate, with the half-eaten potato. Amazing how easy it is to get up and walk away from a table, from a plate of food, how no one stops you, how it wouldn't occur to anyone here that they could stop you.

And there is a soreness to her body, it aches, her head feels softened, muzzy. She has acquired a disturbingly acute sense of smell. The odour of print from a magazine someone is reading across a room can oppress her. She knows what will be on their plates at lunch just from sniffing the air. She can walk down the middle of the ward and can tell who has bathed this week and who has not.

If it squirms, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics. And if you can't understand it, it's mathamatics.

On the train we swapped seats, you wanted the window and I wanted to look at you.

To be a kid is to be invisible and to listen, and to interpret things that aren't necessarily meant for you to hear--because how else do you find out about the world?

Have a little sociological beano. As you said - in sociology one can do anything and call it work.

Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.

Nina flipped through the photos taken at the crime scene and stopped when she noticed

His eyes were a lot older than fifteen." Persephone Hadley(,regarding Callum McGregor)

More and more I was beginning to feel like a spectator in my own life.

His eyes were a lot older than fifteen.

Silence sits like a voyeur with popcorn, watching both of us.

Listen, little girl," said Duke. "If there is one thing you don't do, it's try to break up a cat fight.

Where it concerned history, she saw things that people seldom did.

Le voyageur change ses yeux, le touriste ses billets !