Quotes About Observation

She turned her head slightly, to examine me out of each eye, as though each saw a different world but only one could be trusted.

Watching in dumb show and from a distance made the whole thing look like some strange strange puppet performance, utterly divorced from me and my life.

She looked at the bag, slitty-eyed as a cat by a mouse hole.

When she climbed out of the car, I saw the difference, the sleekness, her buttocks as ripe as mangoes, her arms and legs plump and muscled.

She was beginning to see patterns, learning how to think.

Gwaldus tugged at her collar again. She looked nothing like Hereswith. She was at least two years older, half a hand shorter. Her eyes were grey-green, and her hair would be paler when washed. Her whole body would be paler. Her nipples were more pink than red.

Good surveillence and good books don't mix.

Onnen liked Mulstan, Hild could tell. She also knew Onnen liked the way he ran his holdings, though it lacked the fine and sharp efficiency a woman would bring to the housebold. She liked his daughter and his servants and the ease his housefolk felt in the hall. And she leaned in towards him as though she liked his smell. And Mulstan liked her; Hild saw the way his nostrils flared as Onnen laughed at something he said and patted his arm.

One had to sit still and really quiet to really see, really hear.

Gemæcce, Hild thought, staring at the pattern. She looked up, found Begu looking at her, blushed, looked down again. After a breath of two, she looked up.

I stood behind him for nearly a minute-close enough to smell the familar bitter hint of coffee grounds-before he jerked around and whipped off his shades.

She looked at him, at his sly eyes and stubbled tonsure.

Julia stood and they shook hands in that brittle Southern girl-girl squeeze of limp fingers; the one that says, When did they start letting people like you in? Dornan, of course, noticed none of this. His world was full of Tammy, his girl, his fiancée, the light of his life.

I was walking, enjoying the beer, taking the pulse of the audience because there is always an audience. Of the women at the small tables surrounding the pool area, some were talking, drinking and watching, but some were just drinking and watching.

After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn't see people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way and he wouldn't notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit.

Now when she spied on women and men she crept close and closer, closer than was safe, because she was drawn to the curve of a lip, the gleam of sweat on a throat, and she longed to feel the weigh of glossy hair on her skin.

Breguswith's eyes were hard, bright blue, with none of that milky aging Hild saw in Æffe's and Brugen's eyes.

She looked at me with the same concentration she had directed at the painting. I felt her gaze on the bones, the cant of my eyebrows; weighing the line of jaw and length of neck; noting colour and shadow.

I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.

Your eyes are different in this light. No colour at all. Like cement.

It was a look Hild recognised: a cat watching a stunned mouse in no hurry to kill. Who was his smile for?

Cei called more taunts, but she was smelling the wind and no longer listening.

I was hungry for another viewpoint, to see Julia for the first time.

When I saw her come in that night with you, I said to myself, Now there's a handful, because I thought she'd be snooty, you see. It was the way she carried her head.