Quotes About Observation

We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

The only life we know well, the one on which we are the ultimate authority, is our own. The only experience to which we can bear witness is that which we have personally endured and observed.

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you. 8 Here is one thing that eventually struck me: March 19, 1938, a Saturday.

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our undramatic life.

When she stopped short just at the lower line of the apple tress, and stood for a moment with her face lifted, I chalked one up in her favor. I had stopped my chair at the exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do.

As it turned out, the obvious clearly stated, and combined with new observations, was sometimes close to revolutionary.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination. p. 919

From oriole to crow, note the decline In music. Crow is realist. But, then, Oriole, also, may be realist.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascinating than any fashion salon.

One should be bold and sincere and look at one's own mind as one looks at one's face in a mirror. Here is no attitude of criticizing or judging, or discriminating between right and wrong, or good and bad. It is simply observing, watching, examining. You are not a judge, but a scientist. When you observe your mind, and see its true nature clearly, you become dispassionate with regard to its emotions, sentiments and states.

"I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass."

There was a child went forth every day,And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became.

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river.

When people observe that your life is in harmony with the message, they may not believe, but they know in their conscience that they have met truth.

Jesus did not die for man's sin against man, only for man's sin against God. God decides how we are to treat one another, and therefore when we sin against others we sin against God. David said, "in thy sight," knowing that God looks on. Nothing escapes His notice. One of the marks of regeneration is an awareness that God is watching.

A great painter of men must (as has been said) have a faculty of conversing, but he must also have a capacity for solitude. There is much of mankind that a man can only learn from himself.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

Writing is a form attention and trains the writer's attention to find images and stories.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.