Quotes About Observation

build-your-own-telescope

she saw an old lady and some chickens

I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they've done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven't they?

Watching Prudence, Kit suddenly felt a queer prickling along her spine There was something different about her. The child's head was up. Her eyes were fastened levelly on the magistrate. Prudence was not afraid!

What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely....Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it.

We were too distracted by our own story to pay much attention to all the wonders that were laid before us.

the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest.

Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. Life continues to go on.

be a scientist of your own spiritual experience.

Ann has a preternatural ability to render herself very small—nearly invisible—in order to better observe the world around her in safe anonymity, so that she can write about it, unnoticed. In other words, her superpower is to conceal her superpowers.

Maybe you grew up in an environment where people just sat around watching TV and waiting for stuff to happen to them.

Even as a child, Alma innately comprehended that there were two types of silent men in the world: one type was meek and deferential; the other type was Dick Yancey. His eyes were a pair of slowly circling sharks, and as he stared at Alma now, those eyes were clearly saying: Bring the rum.

There is not a street in Naples in which some tough little kid in shorts and mismatched socks is not screaming up from the sidewalk to some other tough little kid on a rooftop nearby. Nor is there a building in this town that doesn't have at least one crooked old woman seated at her window, peering suspiciously down at the activity below.

as Walt Whitman once wrote, stand 'apart from the pulling and hauling…amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary… both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it all.

It was like looking at a spot on a wall where a clock had hung for years, and seeing only an empty space. She could not train herself not to look; the emptiness surprised her every time.

Any place that one could not leave was not large—particularly if one was a naturalist!

Not merely alive, but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity—a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge.

and inoffensive. She [the pet rabbit] particularly enjoyed sitting in the center of the kitchen table and from that spot would regard Ace, Esther and Hoffman gravely. Bonnie had a feline manner. Will she always be this judgmental? Esther wanted to know. Bonnie became more canine when she was allowed outdoors. She would sleep on the porch, lying on her side in a patch of sun, and if...

The English travel writer Isabel Bird, famous for her cool and detached prose, seemed scarcely able to keep from exclaiming hubba-hubba as she checked out the rugged men she kept encountering on her trip to America in the 1850s:

To have hummingbirds visit. Charlie set up a feeder outside her bedroom window. Never a poet like Dossy, Helen feels a new urge toward veerse. Flit and perch, hovercraft, I follow you.

From her mother, Janie learned to play charades and murder in the dark, to run three-legged races, to spot hermit thrushes, towhees (Mrs. P. said the towhee's call was Drink your tea!; Bea said it was Brush your teeth!), and tell prairie warblers from the maryland yellowthroat and the great horned from the barred owl by their calls.

THe church is full of flowers-yellow roses, lilies, blue hydrangeas spilling forth-and it is on these that Charlie trains his gaze and looks for his mother, who is nowhere to be found. Not even her ashes are in the church, and no coffin, but this is less hard to comprehend than the fact that she is not herself there, a thin old bird, an egret maybe, standing on one leg, head bobbing, long neck swiveling. Contradicting, adding and subtracting. poking fun. Peering out.

I watched you for years," she whispered. The tears were drying on her cheeks, and heat was building within her. If he would just touch her. Touch her there. "I watched you and you never saw me.

She climbed into the carriage and sat down across from the other lady. Pip hopped inside. Miss Royle smiled down at the terrier. Oh, what a sweet little dog! Pip wagged his tail and placed his front paws on Miss Royle's skirts for a pat and Bridget began to suspect he was a flirt.