Quotes About Observation

cock his head this way and that. Called him Cricket, on

There is just no predicting what kind of sentences you might say, thought Flora. For instance, who would ever think you would shout, "You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!"?

In truth what had drawn my eye was the rear view of a young man stripped to the waist and plying an adze along a beam. I could not help but admire his muscled back.

You learn to ride on the path and keep your eyes open so you can see what is there, not what you wish were there.... And then after all you might discover that what is there is what you wished for all along.

And once you saw the world from three, or five, different roads, the view was never the same. The map changed and altered, and its details became more accurate. The landmarks receded or grew, depending on the angle from which you observed them, and at once, there might be an escarpment from which the astonished traveler would rendezvous with her selves and could suddenly comprehend the land as it truly was.

Men wielded their video cameras like weapons, recording rather than experiencing...

Sometimes I wish I could look away, like other people seem to be able to do. Not feel it's my job to put things right.

So here is what actually happened, what happens still: the scene on its parallel track to now, to me: linear and constant, never passing into the past, never speeding into the future.

Beauty! Sid Morris said, addressing the dirty windows that looked out to the alley where, on certain Thursdays, the smell up from the Chinese restaurant across the street reached a point you could almost taste. Beauty! he said.

I have an insidious conviction that between the onset of puberty and the age of thirty, people, like the hypothetical painting in the desert, do no exist without someone looking at them. I didn't. After thirty, I suppose we become a corporeal composite of what all of our viewers have witnessed, a kind of community gelatin.

soldiers on the banks of the canal, they looked carefully to see whether they were Japanese or Chinese so they'd know which pass to pull out.

That's a fine-looking cat.

Like many parents in middle age, he's quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.

Maybe there's a natural order in all this: New things pop up at the edges, but the middle's where the money is. I did that dance myself over the years. I got rich doing it. And now here I am, an old white lady in a fur coat on a Murray Hill sidewalk, eavesdropping on passersby, wondering what I'm missing.

wit, like anything else, is rarely found where rarely sought, and that in my experience it was damned uncommon in men as well.

Our lives are just spectacles. We are like dolls, in a sense, to be observed and played with - often with cruel and deceitful intentions - in an unreal world.

She started at the sound of a knock on the door. Opening it a crack, the clerk peeked her head in. Come out here and look at yourself in the full-length mirrors.

She much preferred to be safely on the outside of life, watching, than deeply involved.

sitting in church doesn't make me a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes me a car

He decided not to try to pin her down on that; he had a feeling it was one he wouldn't win. He hadn't known Isabel Adams an hour before reaching the conclusion that she was extremely unlikely to let slip by accident anything she didn't want him to know.

he slowly put down the hamburger he was eating, stared straight into my eyes, and, without missing a beat, said rather dryly, "That explains a lot.

A too closely watched flower/blossoms the wrong color./Excess attention to the jonquil/turns it gentian. Flowers/need it tranquil to get/their hues right. Some/only open at midnight.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

If one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is a consolation – indeed, a deep satisfaction – to be gained from this observation when looking back over one's life.