Quotes About Observation

Trees and fields tell me nothing: men are my teachers.

That disapproving look was back in her eyes. Her teacher face. The one that could make you squirm from ten paces, even if you were innocent. And I hadn't been innocent for years.

Prospective teachers may read about the science of education, but they'll only grasp the art in their early years by seeing it practiced and having it commended to them.

First I was a mimic. Practically from the moment I began talking, I did impersonations of the people in my neighborhood - the storekeepers, the policemen, my teachers.

They (children) are my teachers. I watch them and I learn. It is important for us to try and be like them and imitate them. They are golden.

Songs are your best teachers. I try to learn something from every song I hear

That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer.

I don't like the way he looks at you." My stomach lurched. "What do you mean? How does he look at me?" "Like you're not a student and he's not a teacher.

Events sometimes are the biggest teachers, as opposed to words, lectures, and that kind of thing.

Listen to life, it is the wisest teacher of all.

Travelling becomes an excellent teacher if the traveller becomes an excellent student!

It's something you don't see until it's gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.

Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.

I read your poems with interest and found them serious, original, linguistically fresh, but first of all you must learn to curb your excess of emotion and write with more distance. As if you the person writing the poems and you the suffering young man are two different people, and as though the former observes the latter coolly, distantly, even with a measure of amusement.

But why write about things that exist even without you? Why describe in words things that are not words?

To write about things that exist, to try to capture a color or smell or sound in words, is a little like playing Schubert when Schubert is sitting in the hall, and perhaps sniggering in the darkness.

while the world worlds up at us."   I

Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei

The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don't speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.

Americans don't really look at one another when talking. They talk to their reflections. They look at others or themselves only when they think nobody is watching. So they never see how they really look. They see themselves smiling without their mouth open, or turned to the side where they cannot see their faults.

I realized then that we miss so much of life while we are part of it. We fail to see ninety percent of the glories of nature, for to do so would require vision that is simultaneously telescopic and microscopic.

From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse's, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.