Quotes About Observation

As a teenager, I would sit at the top of the stairs, staring out the tiny window there. I could see the rooftops of three of my aunt's houses. I could see a distant water tank. On a clear day, I could see all the way to the next town. Someday, I would think, I'll even go beyond there.

I saw Rachel cross her eyes at Jessica, tilt her head to the side and stick her tongue out. If Jessica noticed, she didn't pay attention.

Jessica Ramsey sat next to me, a mystery. I kept looking at her long legs. Maybe she was a dancer or a gymnast or something. Of course, I looked at her face too. Jessica's eyes were huge and dark. Her lashes were so long I wondered if they were fake. Probably not, if her mother was anything like mine, and I decided that was a distinct possibility since Jessica wore glasses and didn't have pierced ears either.

I could tell.

Danielle sat on a desk and propped her feet on a chair. The 3rd graders immediately sat on the floor around her. The older kids followed, but more slowly. Why, I wondered, were the 4th and 5th graders so standoffish and afraid, but not the 3rd graders? Becca and Charlotte were not noted for their bravery.

bug on the wall.

took the inchworm off my shoulder and put it on Sally's pillow to see how she'd react.

I saw the most beautiful cat today. It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied, so complacent.

Interestingly, when one functions in this mode, one quickly recognizes all the other people who are playing the same game. I had many encounters wherein I would meet the eyes of a person across the room, and suddenly we were playing War of the Warlocks: two strangers holding each other's gaze well past the point that our primate genes or cultural conditioning would ordinarily countenance. Play this game long enough and you begin to have some very strange encounters.

is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain. It is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every move.

Berman observes, for instance, that much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians.

Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact.

Witnessing the misadventures of supposedly enlightened adepts and their devotees can be depressing. But it can also be amusing.

there is no impediment to our studying subjective (i.e., first-person) facts "objectively.

After all, there is an enormous difference between being hostage to one's thoughts and being freely and nonjudgmentally aware of life in the present.

The point is that his authority would be derived in the only way that such authority ever is—by making claims about the world that can be corroborated by further observation

we should observe just how deeply implausible the Koranic paradise is.

consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows. That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful.

What you are calling "I" is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.

Meditation doesn't entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness.

She must have been French, because she had more hair under her arm than I did. 

I remember him saying over and over again: go in and check our competition. Check everyone who is our competition. And don't look for the bad. Look for the good. If you get one good idea, that's one more than you went into the store with, and we must try to incorporate it into our company. We're really not concerned with what they're doing wrong, we're concerned with what they're doing right, and everyone is doing something right.

Everyone is looking up toward us, but I am looking back.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.