Quotes About Observation

I hate babies. They're so human—they remind one of monkeys.

I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got.

You never saw a fish on the wall with its mouth shut.

The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected.

People may be understood through the art they produce or by descriptions from friends and family, by observation, or through their dreams.

The true painter must be able, before an infinite panorama, to limit himself to reproducing a single ant.

If you want to know how your girl will treat you after marriage, just listen to her talking to her little brother.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

At meals Mama and Papa would observe each other from opposite ends of the long table, and Mama's grey eyes would fly angry silences at Papa, who would catch them in his enormous mustache. Their marriage was a tall column of pain, like a fluted vase. Balanced precariously on the fricative point at which Mama's personality met Papa's chin, it was always about to fall over and smash.

Those are the most monotonous fuckin' crickets I ever heard in my life.

Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who's going to have a great idea.

because it was from that experience that I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: you can learn from everybody. I didn't just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street.

After only a week on the road, I am changed. It's hard for me to stay too long at a diner or coffee shop. I hear so much now. The air conditioners, dishwashers, coffee machines, and restroom hand dryers rage like an angry electric army.

don't know. I'm just telling you what I can observe, an essential skill of scientists and con men alike.

Most days it feels like I am watching a movie where the sound isn't in sync, the speed is all wrong. Either I'm moving too quickly and the world is dripping along, or the world is moving too quickly, cosmic, and I'm oozing like a slug barely able to pull my own weight. It's best if I keep moving because if I stopped and stood still people would see me shaking.

How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.

In order to obtain the optimum view of what takes place in front of me, I should have to lower my eyes a little. But I lower my eyes no more. In a word, I only see what appears close beside me, what I best see I see ill.

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

If a man has not studied painting, or at any rate black and white drawing, his eyes are wild; learning to draw tames them. The first step towards taming the eyes is to teach them not to see too much.

Painters should remember that the eye, as a general rule, is a good, simple, credulous organ very ready to take things on trust if it be told them with any confidence of assertion.

An artists touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.

Sketching from nature is very like trying to put a pinch of salt on her tail. And yet many manage to do it very nicely.

So it is with most of us: that which we observe to be taken as a matter of course by those around us, we take as a matter of course ourselves.