Quotes About Observation

She will not notice that her clocks have slowed down, because she will herself be thinking more slowly.

Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

Take a straw and throw it up into the air—you shall see by that which way the wind is.

It's not a question of getting the opportunities, it's a question of noticing that opportunities are there.

The problem with artists, Jahanara, is that we often forget the more common things in life. Our heads are so high in the clouds that we don't see the world beneath.

To extract a child from a shallow grave seems at first, to the casual observer, a ludicrously simple matter.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

It] was approached from a distance and gingerly, held at arm's length by outsiders who clearly lacked any sense of fondness for or participation in the forms they were studying.

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

Now, I'm not the most observant of men, which is unfortunate, because I'm a private eye.

Arthur Gremlin was doing a lot of smiling these days. He had seemed pretty tense when he first joined the firm, but the more time he spent with me, and the more he saw me in action, the more he relaxed. Finally after watching me spend three entire days trying to get a carton of milk open, he wiped the milk off his face and relaxed completely for the first time. It's like something that had been nagging at him finally went away.

That's what's wrong with America today, I guess. Something like that. I know something's wrong with America. Maybe that's it.

My friend Oz Katerji once saw a great line of graffiti in Beirut that can work for every war reporter in every war: 'I don't believe in anything. I am just here for the violence.

Henry Adams observes that John Hay has the ability to take the world as a whole rather than pulling it to pieces in criticism. He also observes that, in the routine of a stressful job, this perspective is challenged

What they write in rule books and how things really work are never the same. We all learn that as we get older.

One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore... and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

In addition to being delightful words to say, umwelt and umgebung offer a framework for exploring and describing the experience of other creatures.

I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive. Some day all of this will have to be will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

?Chris can sometimes rush into action when it might be smarter to sit back and bark at it for a while.

She sits like a spider and pulls strings like a puppet master. She watches over all her creatures, and she owns the two of you as surely as she owns me. She has tampered with us for her own purposes.

It was the first Cirocco had seen her less than happy with what she'd seen through a telescope.

It was odd, she thought that she had seen all the male crew members naked, but had to come to Themis to see Gaby. What a strange creature she was with no hair.