Quotes About Observation

I struggle again to draw this man's face in a crowd of faces: which dog-eared lines and frayed adjectives do I use? How do I sketch his visage, the way he looked to me then, at first sight, still mysterious? Among countless pairs of brown eyes, how to distinguish those two soft, open, wise ones, their gaze alert but slightly awkward, marveling? How to outline the lips, nose, brows, chin, so that I can see them afresh, as simple as a portrait on a cafe napkin?

You can write about anything which has been vivid enough to cause you to comment upon it." If a situation has caught your attention to that extent, it has meaning for you, and if you can find what that meaning is, you have the basis for a story.

Black rage shook him. He hadn't had a place to sleep, he hadn't had food, he couldn't even get a beer in this goddamn stinking lousy town. He was ready to turn and walk out when he saw wedged at a table against a wall, McIntyre. In the same silly hat, the red sash. Mac hadn't seen him yet. Mac was watching the dance floor. Sailor knew then that the Sen was here. The Sen and Iris Towers. He took his stance in the room.

She knew he was watching her and she didn't care. She expected it.

You want to know what my doctor said the first time she saw it? Yes you do. She said everything about it gives evidence of an informed taste. That's a quote.

Oh, well. Everyone else has suave, cosmopolitan sheep: why not us? The Millers at Hepple have a ewe that's been to Kelso three times, and they've never been farther than Ford in their lives." Kate peered absently into the farm pond, and clucked again. "Thoughtless creatures. They've forgotten the fish.

The danger, of course, existed in her curiosity, her intelligence, and her stubbornly observant eyes. She had to go away before she found out too much. No one wished her, personally, any harm; she was small and pretty and no one would want to hurt her, but if she became a danger she must suffer.

It's so Quite around here, I'm sure I heard a Bird Fart!

She thought there was a curious hardness about her, as if her beauty was a deceptively rich topsoil, thinly spread over rock.… Finding that no one was looking in her direction, Mrs. Pollifax reached into her purse and surreptitiously examined her passport. Mrs. Lovecraft was absolutely right: there

That night I experienced one of those sudden, unpleasant shifts of perception that occur to parents, when you notice a difference in your child that's been coming over a long time, and you're faced with it, and at the same time you're groping back to touch the child they were a minute ago, while a somehow unaccountable, unpredictable person is watching you, waiting for you to catch up with them, contemptuous because you haven't.

Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.

Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Coolidge is dead" "How could they tell?

In the bosom of a family, nothing can be hidden. One might wish, when things are bad, to suffer unobserved, but in a family there is no chance of that.

She was one of those, born not made, to whom walking in the country is a happiness in itself. She went from one interest to another, poking into streams, looking into banks and hedges for flowers and nests, loitering round farmyards....

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.

I have spent too much time with my eye glued to the viewfinder and ended up missing both the image of the mind and that on film.

Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like ... ow ... ound... round... ground! That's it! That's a good name -- ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And wow! Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like... ow... ound... round... ground! That's it! That's a good name — ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others…

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

My wife is a lovely leathery green, the blue-tongued lizard said; Her eyes are as red as bulldog ants, lurking in holes in her head; Her body is made of the speckled grass, a violet grows on her tongue, And I could watch her for fifty years if nobody blundered along.

We look away until we have no choice. Then we examine them, remember them, and look away again, as if we're not meant to think too much about them, but to live. Just live and forget.

humankind's fundamental understanding of the nature of reality. If an observer could alter the universe by his observation, then didn't the universe require consciousness to even exist?