Quotes About Observation

There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, and there were generally fewer people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate.

Each morning they came around, three brisk and serious men with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes...

namely, never interfere when your enemies are busily engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction.

Mindfulness also means experiencing the present moment without self-conscious judgment.

For a real glimpse into an almost vanished world, one should look...at a scorpion who so obviously has no business lingering into the twentieth century. He is not shaped like a spider and he has too many legs to be an insect. Plainly, he is a discontinued model--still running but very difficult, one imagines, to get spare parts for.

I have drawn from books written by learned experts and also upon my observation of living creatures in whom I have long delighted and with whom I have perhaps more sympathy than some of those who remain austerely scientific. The intuitions of a lover are not always to be trusted; but neither are those of the loveless.

There was a full moon in the starless sky. I thought how rarely I had noticed such things. Some deep failure of the soul perhaps. An inherited emptiness. A nothingness passed from generation to generation. A flaw in the psyche, discovered only by those who suffer by it.

Quite a few people are here to study the European Union. Perhaps there is such a thing as the European Union. When I am on the bus, I don't see or feel any union. I see all sorts of things, but that sort of big newspaper-headlines knowledge is not with me, nor do I want it to shape the phenomenology of the place.

I feel very transparent in myself. I'm more of an observer. I'm interested in what's going on. I'm not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people — but when I'm not with them I don't have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

If Hannah knew where he was! – frankly eyeing a hatcheck girl his faughter Geraldine's age, noting her legs in black patterned stockings, her feet in black stiletto-heeled shoes, feeling the first dim stirrings of desire so faint and so sad it was like hearing a telephone ringing and ringing in a distant room you couldn't hope to get to and if you did the call wouldn't be for you.

They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars.

My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day. You see the approach, you contemplate the beauty of the cloud, you observe it passing, you let it go. You do not dwell upon what you have seen, you do not regret it, you are content to understand that the identical cloud will never come again—no matter how beautiful, unique, you do not weep at its loss.

one kept me informed on Dad's progress. Or lack of progress. Or how serious it all was—is. You certainly didn't, darling." Yet, was this true? Vaguely I seemed to know that my father was not doing well for some time. Driving on our country roads you see the carcasses of animals—raccoons, deer—lying at the roadside, killed

It was remarkable to Julia—(it did not hurt or offend her, but only amused her)—how Ryan's family managed to take photographs or videos of themselves that excluded her.

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space—who else? & that night in my sand-colored 1987 Ford van with the American flag decal covering the rear window cruising Cedar Street, Dale Springs & parked in shadow & with my binoculars trained to the mostly shaded or darkened windows I thought, If this is where I am this is who I am. & so it was.

If Marianne had noticed.

She'd perfected a method of not-seeing which was a kind of reverse social radar.

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.

And though there were no children playing, no doves, no blue-shadowed roof tiles, I felt that the town was alive. And that if I heard only silence, it was because I was not accustomed to silence - maybe because my head was still filled with sounds and voices.

Y aunque no había niños jugando, ni palomas, ni tejados azules, sentí que el pueblo vivía. Y que si yo escuchaba solamente el silencio, era porque aún no estaba acostumbrado al silencio; tal vez porque mi cabeza venía llena de ruidos y de voces.

La??m çukurunun ba??na oturmuÅŸ, kurbaÄŸalar?n ç?kmas?n? bekliyorum.

Y Natalia se olvidó de mí desde entonces. Yo sé cómo le brillaban antes los ojos como si fueran charcos alumbrados por la luna. Pero de pronto se destiñeron, se le borró la mirada como si la hubiera revolcado en la tierra. Y pareció no ver ya nada.

Me di cuenta que su voz estaba hecha de hebras humanas, que su boca tenía dientes y una lengua que se trababa y destrababa al hablar, y que sus ojos eran como todos los ojos de la gente que vive sobre la tierra.