Quotes About Observation

At first she mistook them for sheets of pink crepe paper that someone had crumpled and carelessly flung down the hillside, perhaps after another astonishing party at the club. A moment later she remembered her great-grandmother's words and saw that they were hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come up in the night after the first fall of rain.

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?

As children, in our own school of life, we soak up clues about our world just as eagerly as small squirrels. Exposure to children's books provides verbal and visual material to help us along the way. So subtle and varied can the lessons be that it may take years before we use everything we absorbed.

Mrs. Knowles looked off in the distance, which wasn't all that far in a trailer, and tapped her worn fingers on the arm of the recliner.

It sure did grow big snowballs, didn't it?

When we came in she had her chair sideways, without even looking up to know that it was us, that the doctors had said that sitting and staring at the snow was a waste of time; she should get involved in something. She laughed and told us it wasn't a waste of time. It would be a waste of time just to stare at snowflakes, but she was counting, and even that might be a waste of time, but she was only counting the ones that were just alike

If you look at the photograph...and read: `Skunk Cabbage - a plant with thick roots, wide leaves, and disagreeable smell,` you will not want to look at the cabbage itself. But if you get down on your knees and study it (holding your breath), you will find a pattern of delicate lines, curling shapes, velvety shadows, and fresh beauty.

Vincent looked to Justus's ears. "I see you wore those earrings.

The fair one was the prettier, round and soft, but Magnus noticed the dark one first; her black hair was streaked with luminescent blue.

Don't be daft, lad. I've worked with more loonies than you've had hot dinners. And I don't just mean the offenders.

occurred to her suddenly that Rachael looked very like an otter herself, with her chunky front teeth, the brown hair which would turn grey when she was still young

Oh, I'm interested in everything, Joe. That's why I'm a bloody brilliant detective.

Perez might irritate the shit out of him, but he was the best judge of character Taylor knew. He watched men like David Attenborough watched animals.

The inspector listened to folk talking, just throwing in a question occasionally, like tossing a pebble into a pool and waiting to see what the ripples stirred up.

An inspector's role was strategic. Except that she'd always been seduced by the detail. She told herself she'd be back at the station before lunchtime.

This was what Vera missed, now she had to spend so long at her desk. The prying and nebbing into other folk's business.

Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly distinguish the high round chimneys on the tops of the houses, which yet seemed to us to form an innumerable number of smaller spires, or steeples.

While we women dilly-dally, making decisions, leaving jobs half done, forgetting where we've put the house keys while we water the Hoover and leave the laundry in the dishwasher, men, like blinkered horses, look straight ahead, oblivious to peripheral vision, where a discarded pile of wet towels might have caught their eye.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

Travel in all the four quarters of the earth, yet you will find nothing anywhere. Whatever there is, is only here.

Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be conscious of, and therefore plays a part in the coming into being of whatever exists for us.

If you pay attention to the world, it's an amazing place. If you don't, it's whatever you think it is.

If I'm around people I don't know well - if I'm at a bar or I'm hanging out with a group of people I don't know or whatever - I'm quiet. I don't say a lot. I listen. I watch. I observe.

I feel that as artists - whatever your medium is - I feel that we're watching what goes on around us and we take what we don't see, or we don't hear, or we don't feel and we do something that speaks of it; more about it, for it, or against it - whatever our perspective is - that's what our job is.