Quotes About Observation

I've really grown to love film, but I think occasionally you need to get up on a stage and see what's going on.

The atmosphere is great for people - it allows us to survive - but it's a real headache for astronomers.

It's a different world: when I'm writing 'Toast,' I've got one foot in 1974 and one foot in the modern day, because the modern day is nowhere near as funny or interesting.

I don't know how it started but someone must have noticed I was always chewing tobacco or smoking a pipe.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

I'm very conscious of what I wear, and what I say. I know that if I go out, there will be 10 people who will notice me from head to toe.

Going into Portland, I was just trying to not step on anybody's toes, stay quiet, and play my game. I think I was just trying to figure out the kind of sequences I was going to see as a hitter and learn from that.

People are going to make their own minds up, and seeing how happy people are together and how much fun they're having, people are always going to think 'ooh are they in a relationship? They look so happy together.'

Dead people never seem to address the obvious - the things you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: 'Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?'

attachment of great intensity and passion, such as one rarely sees. One could not wish, for oneself or for one's friends, any first-hand experience of such extremity of feeling - it is not conducive to comfortable living. And yet there is about it, when observed, something curiously touching and attractive, so that one almost, absurdly, regrets one's own inability to entertain it.

My mind was a little distracted from these anxieties by our encountering a singularly beautiful girl. I should mention, perhaps, lest I be thought in any wat to have misled my readers, that her figure was pudgy, her complexion sallow and her hair a rather drab shade of brown. These possible defects, however, pass unnoticed in a young woman whose expression is that of a medieval saint after a particularly satisfactory vision of the Eternal City.

Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.

He told her the flowers in her painting contained exactly the purple substance of the flowers on the desk in front of her [...] Let us open the window and see if your painting can entice the butterflies.

The entire time I was in the camp it was as if I had a double personality. My real self seemed to be observing what was happening to my physical self.

I want [my daughter] to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind.

You've got steel in you, Stahlia; that's why you recognize it in her.

In fourth grade we played hard. The fifth-grade girls played four square, too, but they didn't jeer at each other when they played, and they hit the ball gently from square to square. Their slowness seemed deliberate, as if they were dancing. Their skirts brushed slowly against their knees as they swayed. It wasn't so much that they looked different; they just looked as if they knew they were being watched.

I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.

There must be birds that sing or fly better or worse than other birds of their species; I've never noticed any. But the birds have.

He foll0wed her as she crossed to the four-station apparatus. His attention was glued to her butt the whole way. realizing what he was doing, he snapped his gaze away and checked to make sure no one had noticed. Nope. They were all too busy staring at Jamie's butt.

It was a unique experience. He'd never been jealous of a juice glass before.- Kelon

At home, it was part of my life that Ivo was always watching me, unblinking, the slits of his pupils expanding and contracting as a cat's do when it considers whether or not to pounce on its prey.

I could see her blush, even through her tan, but her eyes were steady and unapologetic.

I watched him, trying to decide if he was lying about how badly he was hurt, and suddenly like throwing open a pair of shutters, I saw the muscles of his back moving beneath his skin, the strength of his shoulders, the long-fingered grace of his hands. I had always known that Mildmay, despite being a good half foot shorter than I, was as muscular and agile as an acrobat, but now I saw that he was beautiful.