Quotes About Observation

A person got to really see things if she wasn't racing through life

Maybe if she watches him closely enough she'll understand what makes one person kind and another, herself for instance, mistrustful and hopeless.

He studied me, searching my expression, not quite seeing what had happened but aware that something had changed.

You can always tell a liar, for he will not look at you when he speaks, and often he has white spots on his fingernails, one to mark every lie he's told.

Keep your eyes open," Isabelle told the siblings. "You may see her in the yard. This is what happens when you repudiate who you are. Once you do that, life works against you, and your fate is no longer your own.

No wonder that afterward Lynn told anyone within earshot that she now believed it was impossible ever to divine a person's truest nature. Eric Herman, on the other hand, was not really surprised at Betsy's sudden departure. He had seen the way she'd looked at lightening.

Neki ljudi znaju to?an trenutak kad su sve izgubili. Mogu se vratiti u prošlost i vidjeti to jasno kao na dlanu, ali ni za živu glavu ne mogu shvatiti zašto to nisu primijetili dok se doga?alo.

It's easy to keep to yourself if you hang back and always sit in the last row and slip around corners as if you were a ghost.

Il y avait dans leur regard, ainsi que dans le geste de Mr. Carpenter, un air de propriétaire. Comme si, après s'être approprié les trottoirs et les rues, ils s'apprêtaient maintenant à s'approprier les enfants qui y jouaient.

Mary lifted her own steno book. Only about six pages old, it still had its cool, slim heft and straight cardboard covers. By the end of the month, its pages would be bloated with the pencil strokes of her shorthand, its back would be cracked and its edges softened. And then she would begin another. The march of time. Pauline's eyes

He was not tall, but the fingers that held his hat against his overcoat were exceptionally long and thin. She saw how they moved one at a time against the dark brown felt, pressing themselves against the fabric almost imperceptibly, like a pulse under the skin. The way a child's fingers might move in sleep.

Pauline examined her face for a few seconds more, her jaw set. And then she smiled a little, not kindly, raising her eyebrows and slowly shaking her big head. "You are naïve," she said, as if confirming something she had already spent a good deal of time discussing, elsewhere. "You really are." Mary shrugged. "I suppose. But that wind was making everyone tear up.

The sand here, at their feet as they looked down from the dry cliff, was dark gray, the color of a thundercloud. The

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting.

The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities - see the humanity - in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware.

The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

Le truc, dans la vie, avait expliqué Harry à Lauren, était de vivre avec intérêt. D'ouvrir l'oeil pour voir les possibilités - voir l'humanité - qui existait chez chacun de ceux qu'on rencontrait. Être à l'écoute. S'il avait quoi que ce soit à lui apprendre, c'était cela. Être à l'écoute. (p.212)

A skunk is walking by. Skunks don't hurry or hide. The dogs and cats pretend not to notice them. It is best not to.

Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn't watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I'm afraid. A one-sided card cajoling and coaching of the young, a one way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never get signed.

She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.