Quotes About Observation

Scriassine studied me in turn. You're not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they're not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.

A representação do mundo, como o próprio mundo, é operação dos homens; eles descrevem-no do ponto de vista que lhes é peculiar, e que confundem com a verdade absoluta.

Curiosa cosa, un diario: lo que uno calla es más importante que lo que anota.)

My eyes followed André. Maybe it is during those moments, as I watch him disappear, that he exists for me with the most overwhelming clarity: his tall shape grows smaller, each pace marking out the path of his return; it vanishes and the street seems to be empty; but in fact it is a field of energy that will lead him back to me as to his natural habitat: I find this certainty even more moving than his presence.

La tierra está a mi alrededor como una vasta hipótesis que ya no verifico.

La littérature apparaît lorsque quelque chose dans la vie se dérègle [...]

May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.

To see a landscape as it is when I am not there... When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.

He even got used to living in a lack of privacy like that of a monkey in a Zoo. After a time he could without self-consciousness sit and read the Paris editions

Gosh all fishhooks! Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed hot chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glace nuts, in the mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, it gets me why Dad doesn't just pass out from being so poky.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures all on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture; and no one knows a cafe till he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters. These

Actually, the great traveler is usually a small mussy person in a faded green fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily. He knows all the facts about nineteen countries, except the home-lives, wage- scales, exports, religions, politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate.

Kat had her arms folded and her hair was tied in what girls call a topknot. Her skinny, bony face jutted out. With her tilted chin and dark eyebrows she seemed sharper, somehow, as if she was more in focus than other people round her, or more real. You couldn't help noticing her, whether you were looking for her or not. Maybe that's what being pretty meant, I thought.

lilo on the floor next to my bed was empty. I looked out of the window

I followed you.' I saw no one.' That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.

By George! cried the inspector. How did you ever see that? Because I looked for it.

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.

If you want to write good copy, you must be where the things are.

He made the country down in Illinois, and He made the Missouri, the little girl continued. I guess somebody else made the country in these parts. It's not nearly so well done. They forgot the water and the trees.

I can never bring you to realise the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

El mundo está lleno de cosas obvias, que nadie por casualidad alguna vez observa.

Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.

I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.