Quotes About Observation

We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.

Talk is cheap, but look at how people behave, not at what they say.

The back windows looked out over the fields, then the Atlantic, maybe a hundred yards away. Actually, I'm just making that bit up. I had no idea how far away the sea was. Only men could do things like that. Half a mile. Fifty yards. Giving directions, that sort of thing. I could look at a woman and say Thirty-six C. Or Let's try it in the next size up. But I had no idea how far away Tim's sea was except that I wouldn't want to walk to it in high heels.

Didn't go in, just hovered outside like homeless person because (a) place was too small and Detta would have spotted me, and (b) once you're through doors of shop like that, if you try to leave without buying anything, they shoot you in the back with sniper's rifle.

That's like the dog calling the cat's arse hairy!

Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Elly Kleinman's Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes.

even the most commonplace man knows a great deal more concerning any fellow-man than does even the cleverest, shrewdest woman.

Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two ines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist a metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

Agate, population 70, is one of those towns that people describe as 'blink and you'll miss it.' Lois A. Engel loved living in the blink.

It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.

I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.

And here is a prejudice of mine, confirmed by my lights through many years of observation. Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform.

Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is.

He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jackknife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.

Did you see Lucille? No. Yes. Lucille was everywhere, but we did not speak.

Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don't. But you listen to them anyway. So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.

One of Lindon's amusing word-unit palindromes reads: Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl. Other palindromes are symmetric with respect to back-to-front reading letter by letter-Able was I ere I saw Elba (attributed jokingly to Napoleon), or the title of a famous NOVA program: A Man, a Plan, a Canal, Panama.

Galileo established what has since become the modern approach to the study of all natural phenomena.

In this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful.

It was a question I asked myself each time one of these studies or field observations came to my attention, and I saw, once again, that no mention was made, even in passing, of those wandering tellers of tales, who seemed to me to be the most exquisite and precious exemplars of that people, numbering a mere handful, and who, in any event, had forged that curious emotional link between the Machiguengas and my own vocation (not to say, quite simply, my own life).

A él le parecía que Gertrudis se había convertido con los años en una especie de mueble, que había dejado de ser una persona viviente.

Algunos hombres, algunas mujeres, tienen una sensibilidad más intensa que otros, sienten y perciben cosas que a los demás nos pasan desapercibidas.