Quotes About Observation

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.

There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers...

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.

Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.

Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

I take a pleasure in inquiring into things. I've never been content to pass a stone without looking under it. And it is a black disappointment to me that I can never see the far side of the moon.

That's why I'm talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.

There is a great deal to be seen in the tilt of a hat on a man.

Only once or twice in her life had she ever understood all of him, but the part of him which she knew, she knew intricately and well. No little appetite or pain, no carelessness or meanness in him escaped her; no thought or dream or longing in him ever reached her. And yet several times in her life she had seen the stars.

The ants were busy on the ground, big black ones with shiny bodies and the little dusty quick ants. Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him. He watched the ants moving, a little column of them near to his foot, and he put his foot in their path. Then the column climbed over his instep and continued on its way, and Kino left his foot there and watched them move over it.

It's like a life--so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

He lived in a strange, silent house and looked out of it through calm eyes. He was a stranger to all the world, but he was not lonely.

He's got a can up there,' Richard said.

I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why folks walk in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush. Gonna hear husban' an' wife a-poundin' the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with 'em an' learn. Gonna lay in the grass, open an' honest with anybody that'll have me. Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn't understan'. All them things is good things.

The one-eyed man watched them go, and then he went through the iron shed to his shack behind. It was dark inside. He felt his way to the mattress on the floor, and he stretched out and cried in his bed, and the cars whizzing by on the highway only strengthened the walls of his loneliness.

And her eyes were on the highway, where life whizzed by.

You must name a thing before you can note it on your hand drawn map.

They were students of the expressions of young women as they went in to confession, and they saw them as they came out and read the nature of the sin.

Things that happen are of no importance. But from everything that happens, there is a lesson to be learned.

It is good to know what you are doing. The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way.