Quotes About Observation

Do you know why you walk slowly when you're old?" "No." "Because with age you receive the gift of friction. The less time you have, the more you suffer, the more you feel, the more you observe, and the more slowly time moves even as it races ahead." "I don't understand." "You will.

When I got back to Rome I discovered that the Italian army considered me dead—in Gruensee, in the observation post, and on the Cima Bianca. That I was reported killed three times seemed not to affect their trust in the reports except to strengthen it. Being the army, they must have thought that anyone who was killed three times was most certainly deader than if he had been killed only once.

Isn't Mr. Cecil Wooley the fattest, slittiest-eyed thing you've ever seen? And don't you suppose that being called Reverend Doctor Mootfowl is not a common phenomenon, and never has been?

Craig Binky siedziaÅ' w widocznym miejscu i to, co nastÄ…piÅ'o w tej chwili, nie umkn??o uwadze ani jednej osoby. ZÅ'apaÅ' siÄ™ za pierÅ› i brew, jakby dostaÅ' zawaÅ'u i udaru jednoczeÅ›nie, po czym zaczÄ…Å' siÄ™ krzywi?, wykonujÄ…c seriÄ™ min, których ekspresja zawstydziÅ'aby prawdziwego mima.

On my last ride on the RR train I looked almost as lovingly at the faces and expressions of my fellow passengers as if I were staring a a photograph of times long past. They did not know that they made a photograph. They did not understand the vanishing background of their lives...

A friend once told me that I find my stories because I never learned to drive. It's true. I take the bus. I walk around. By being out there—not the driver of my story but the literal and figurative rider—I have the opportunity to see things that I would never otherwise see. I

Revolutions are always easier to admire from across the border.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. —MARCEL PROUST

I tried so hard to please that I never realized no one is watching.

Writing a novel creates a window to a new way of looking at the world. Reading one means looking through that window.

I feel that one of the most important lessons that can be learned is that what we see may be different than what is actually in front of us.

Oh my word, three huge ravens just flew gracefully over my head. Beautiful.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.

Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author's childhood. A writer's childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.

Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. It is, as Ruskin says, 'not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.' . . . I have to say the words, describe what I'm seeing. . . . But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present.

I myself was both observer and observable, and so a possible object of my own humming awareness.

The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of colour patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated.

The great hurrah about wild animals is that they exist at all, and the greater hurrah is the actual moment of seeing them. Because they have a nice dignity, and prefer to have nothing to do with me, even as the simple objects of my vision. They show me by their very wariness what a prize it is simply to open my eyes and behold.

They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship's stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave.

Annie Dillard

there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut.