Quotes About Observation

strangely alone in the most public of places.

I don't yell back at my mother. When I'm angry or scared or upset, I don't yell. I stay quiet. I've seen how she is, how she would get with Kent and with me and with other people, life if someone at the pharmacy got in the wrong line or asked too long a question, or if someone on the bus accidentally bumped her. I've watched her my whole life, the way people react to her. It doesn't actually help you get what you want, yelling and being like that. It only makes people think bad of you.

if you want to make a room full of geologist shut up, tir their hands to their sides.

He stands up, slowly, and puts his hands on the zipper of his jeans, where I notice there's a bulge that looks like someone stuck a cucumber in his pants. That can be his...thing, can it? He undoes the button then his fly and then slides his jeans down. He's wearing those tight boxer-briefs things, like that guy in the Calvin Klein commercial, and I realize, it's definitely not a cucumber.

I thought again how you could never really know what you were seeing with just a glance, in motion, passing by. Good or bad, right or wrong. There was always so much more.

It's funny how someone's perception of you can be formed without you even knowing it.

As I shut the door and started to walk away, I heard him say, Hey. Sydney. Yeah? You had on a shirt with mushrooms on it, and your hair was pulled back. Silver earrings. Pepperoni slice. No lollipop. I just looked at him, confused. Layla was walking toward us now. The first time you came into Seaside, he said. You weren't invisible, not to me. Just so you know.

I'd only met him once, at the mall. He was tall, with a big floppy shock of blond hair he was always getting out of his face by jerking his head suddenly to the side, whiplash-style. Rina found this incredibly sexy. It made me nervous. - Caitlin about Jeff

He was looking at me, jsut as I'd thought he would be, but like Bert's, his light was not what I expected. No pity, no sadness: nothing had changed. I realized all the times I'd felt people stare at me, their faces had been pictures, abstracts. None of them were mirrors, able to reflect back the expression I thought one I wore, the feelings only I felt.

But unfriendly is usually one of those things you pick up on right away. You know, like B.O. There's no hiding it if it's there.

Everything looks different when you're older, not staring up at the world but down upon it.

So I left him there alone to watch history repeat the same events retold again and again on his own.

Sometimes you dont even want to think aout what people are doing with their groceries.

This is personal, she'd said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn't see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.

From what I could see, the hardwood was just fine. Then again, I'd just see a windmill and an open sky, too, never feeling the need to conquer either. You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

From up above, in a plane passing over, you'd just see one little light in all this dark, with no idea of the lives that were being lived within it, and in the house beside, and beside that one. So much happening in the world, night and day, hour by hour. It was no wonder we were meant to sleep, if only to check out of it for a little while.

That was the nice thing about the Spot: you could hear everything, but no one could see you.

You just had to know where to look.

That's the thing about someone who rarely gets upset: when they do, you notice.

The lizard stared up at us, and we stared back, taking each other in. He was little and defenseless, I felt sorry for him already. This was a screwed-up place he'd just come into. But he didn't have to know that. Not yet, anyway. There in that room, where it was hot and cramped, the world probably still seemed small enough to manage.

You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

We were all staring as we passes him, slowly, like a tourist at a wildlife park watching elephants from the safety of their wagon.

I didn't hear the footsteps. Or see the shadow. Instead from where I was crouched on the ground, the green of the grass filling my vision, the first thing I made out were hands, a flat silver ring on the middle finger of each. One was clutching my notes. The other was reaching out for me.

At times, I found myself questioning his very existence, even though I knew I had, in fact, spotted him, with my own eyes.