Quotes About Observation

To close read is to linger, to dally, to take pleasure in tarrying, and to hold out that these activities can allow us to look both hard and askance at the norm.

He strolled to the front door and stood watching, letting the picture of Felicity grave itself so deeply on his mind that when with the passing of time it would seem to other people that she had grown old and lost her beauty it would not seem so to him.

Our gaze changes all that it falls upon. 

His face reminded her of an open book that's fallen into a puddle.

I know that. I've read it before,' 'Is that so? What is it like to read a novel when you know what's going to happen?' 'Once you know the story, you can notice other things.

Aber ich weiß, dass deine Maßstäbe unglaublich hoch sind. Ich glaube, die meisten Menschen könnten ihnen nicht genügen. Nicht ständig. Und genauso kann ich kritisch sein und dich trotzdem sehr gern haben. Ich kann nicht anders, als es zu bemerken, aber das ändert nichts an meinen wirklichen Gefühlen.

Sull'aeroplano ci sentiamo membri di un organismo gigantesco: tutto sotto di noi si fa piccolo, maneggevole e lezioso come un giocattolo, finché ogni cosa si scioglie in una distanza indistinta sotto di noi e la nostra casa diventa il cielo, che ci appare pieno di dettagli e di cose da osservare.

The birds do not like this camera," Sveinsson said. "So they fly over it and shit on it.

buried the lede. Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare. The notion that a sixth such event would be taking place right now, more or less in front of our eyes, struck me as, to use the technical term, mind-boggling.

ISLANDS are worlds in miniature or, as the writer David Quammen observed, "almost a caricature of nature's full complexity." By this account, One Tree is a caricature of a caricature.

and handjobs on crows.

As Rachel Carson once observed, referring to a very different but at the same time profoundly similar problem: "Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.

After one of my falls, Bednarski pointed out to me a tarantula the size of my fist sitting on the next tree over.

The first view I got of Suci was her prodigious backside.

I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?

I've noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one.

Fall, not spring, is the time in this region to clear away dead leaves and branches, to renovate the borders, to start new gardens.... And even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn.

The woman had been seen now a half-dozen times and had become a mass of characteristic motions and friendly staring eyes. Ellen longed to fix her into a thought, to know what she would say now that she knew how she would look saying it. She longed to find her out, to like her or to hate her.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

You," she might have said to a particular grackle. "Georgia. Is it?

Look at the evening grackles strung on their overhead wires like Morse code! Impossible not to believe they spelled out something. But they didn't; they were meaningless, in their numbers and their prattle. The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle. Maybe they don't want anything. Maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?

She noticed real tension in Paul's jaw, his mandibles pulled back like

This town is infested with squirrels, have you noticed?" "I'd rather say it's rich with squirrels.

It's so weird how people like hamsters so much better than squirrels," Veblen added, knowing that hamsters were hindgut fermenters and coprophagists, whereas squirrels were nothing of the sort.