Quotes About Observation

Werner looks up at the stone houses arrayed wall to wall, tall and aloof, their faces damp, their windows dark. No lamplight anywhere. No antennas. The rain falls so softly, almost soundlessly, but to Werner it roars.

The murex Dr. Geffard keeps on his desk can entertain her for a half hour, the hollow spines, the ridged whorls, the deep entrance; it's a forest of spikes and caves and textures; it's a kingdom. Her

Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, and

Open your eyes and see what you can before they close forever.

When he smiles you can see his incisors. She knows that walk, that face, those eyebrows.

and he thinks of Argus Panoptes, the watchman of Hera, who had eyeballs all over his head and even on the tips of his fingers, so many eyes that when he closed fifty of them to sleep he held fifty more open to keep watch.

Though perhaps what has changed are the eyes that see it

Clouds like those," he'd show her, "are called cumulus congestus. Each one is riding along on a big column of slowly cooling air. Like a big invisible ice-cream cone. That small cloud there probably weighs five hundred thousand pounds." "Nooo," she'd say. "It's floating—it weighs nothing." Still, she would not look away.

Then she begins to move her arms in a short, intricate dance, striking the palm of one hand with the edge of the other, circling her fingers through the air, touching her right ear, finally pointing both index fingers at Joseph. He does not know what to make of it. Her fingers repeat the dance: her hands draw a circle; the palms turn up; the fingers lock. Her lips move but no sound comes out. There is a large silver watch on her wrist which rides up and down her forearm as she gesticulates.

All the things he did not see... (a black bear, two hawks, horsemen, a trio of summer cabins far below him...)

she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward's museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren't allowed to touch.

I look up at John Paul's bedroom and think, If his bed is near the window, he can watch clouds soaring past the cupola - huge anvils of cumulus, pale and full of shoulders. The wind slowly tears them to shreds. Thin blades of light slip through and touch down everywhere.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Ah, so the perfidious female is a common species in America too, eh?" inquired the French officer, laughing again. "Isn't it a worldwide phenomenon?

Helga never will admit that she is clever, yet I find she discovers from me what she wants to know, and I suspect hides successfully the small matters of which she in her wifely discretion deems I had best remain ignorant. Being thus able to manage me, she was equal to coping with the butler.

The house is seventies modern with sliding windows, gas-effect and a giant TV in the living room. There are almost no books. I'm not making any judgement. It's just the sort of thing I can't help but notice.

You'd have thought that after twenty years editing murder mysteries I'd have noticed when I found myself in the middle of one.

Pünd remembered their first case together when Fraser had failed to notice that his travelling companion, on the three-fifty train from Paddington, was actually dead.

The grieving widow,' Hawthorne muttered. 'Do you think so?' 'No, Tony. I've seen more grief at a Turkish wedding. If you ask me, I'd say there's a lot of things she's not telling

One car behind him. Two

I don't know how anyone can tell them apart. They even wear the same clothes all the time, which is a bit creepy.

I've met police dogs with more intelligence than those two. You could tell them everything we've done, down to the last word, and they'd still end up running around in a circle, sniffing each other's arses.

figured it wasn't Davina. She drinks like a fish. Again, who drinks Coca-Cola at eight o'clock in the evening?

That's what he said. So if she could see him across the road, that means her eyesight was perfectly good. She made up the whole thing.