Quotes About Observation

Optimumque est, ut volgo dixere, aliena insania frui. And the best plan is, as the popular saying was, to profit by the folly of others. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis

she glanced up casually at the two men who'd just sat down at a nearby table. The one with his back to her was tall and broad, with dark, curly hair, and before she could remind herself that he couldn't be Strike, because her partner was in St. Mawes, a thrill of excitement and happiness passed through her.

Strike registered the pronounced asymmetry of his pale blue eyes, one of which was a good centimeter higher than the other. It gave him an oddly vulnerable look, as though he had been finished in a hurry.

Even if Heather had barely known her, as seemed to be the case, her frank enjoyment of her fancy lunch and her persistent eyeing-up of Strike seemed both inappropriate and distasteful to Robin.

when her mouth puckered into hard little lines around the cigarette, it looked like a cat's anus.

While he took care never to let her see him, Strike doubted that her hollow eyes would retain much of an impression even if he had moved into plain view. They had become shuttered, full of inner darkness, no longer taking in the outside world.

Parky, isn't it?" Strike said to the frowning constable and her companion as he and Robin walked back past them.

Robert Galbraith

He liked Robin; he was grateful to her; he was even (after this morning) impressed by her; but, having normal sight and an unimpaired libido, he was also reminded every day she bent over the computer monitor that she was a very sexy girl.

She was almost monosyllabic among the buckets of mimosa and lilies a quarter of an hour later. The florist fussed and fiddled, holding blooms against Robin's hair and accidentally letting drops of cold, greenish water fall from the long stem of a rose onto her cream sweater.

Judging by the lopsided way she was hunched, with one hand buried deep under the lapel of her coat, Strike deduced that he had saved her by grabbing a substantial part of her left breast.

Robin wondered how aware men were of the power dynamics that played out between them, while women stood watching.

As always, he found her better-looking in the flesh than in the memory he had of her when not present. This

She locked the bathroom door and sat down on the floor in the loose T-shirt she had worn to bed, focusing on her breathing, on the feel of the cool tiles beneath her bare legs, observing, as she had been taught, the rapid beating of her heart, the adrenaline jolting through her veins, not fighting her panic, but watching it. After a while, she consciously noticed the faint smell of the lavender body wash she had used last night, and heard the distant passing of an airplane.

Least said, soonest mended,' she always says. That and 'least seen, most admired.

There was, she noticed, a fragment of frozen pea caught in the setting of her engagement ring.

If you spot anything, or you think of anything I haven't, tell me, won't you?" This was rather thrilling: Robin prided herself on her observational powers; they were one reason she had secretly cherished the childhood ambition that the large man beside her was living.

We lack, yet cannot fix upon the lack: Not this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly. We see the things we do not yearn to see Around us: and what see we glancing back? Christina Rossetti Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets

He pointed a finger at the sky. 'What?' said Robin, looking up into the blue haze. 'If you look carefully,' said Strike, 'you might just see an asteroid passing through the house of bollocks.

You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the

Good though his eyesight was, however, he would have been unlikely to spot the Stanley knife being turned rhythmically between long, fine fingers.

When Heather pulled her chair in, one of the bright overhead lights illuminated her breasts so that they looked like twin moons; the waiter who'd arrived to hand out menus stared for a few seconds as though dazed.

The corners of his mouth twitched, but as Robin didn't see him smiling, he felt no compulsion to explain.

Strike se dio cuenta de que estaba asistiendo a una crisis unilateral