Quotes About Observation

His eyesight wasn't as keen as it had been, but he knew a changing mind when he saw it.

Normally I didn't see a great deal. I didn't hear a great deal either. I didn't pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn't there. Strictly speaking I believe I've never been anywhere.

Wherever you have seen God pass, mark that spot, and go and sit in that window again.

Some critics, and for that matter most of them, I fear, rejoice in faults as buzzards do in carrion, to feed upon it; but a true critic is a surgeon, who cuts away the wen, or imposthume, that he may rejoice in the cleanness of a body restored to health.

A man that does nothing but watch evil, never will overcome it.

He that lives by the sight of the eye may grow blind.

Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground.

In one of Chekhov's short stories, a little boy is drawing a picture. His father asks him why the man in the picture is taller than the house. "If he were smaller," says the child reasonably, "you couldn't see his eyes." ENTRY:

What are those?" I asked, pointing up. "Those are ceiling," Varya said. "And here—sink. See—only turn so, and ffft! water!

and a man at the back who Jules considered surprisingly good looking for somone who believed in god.

It's a truism in policing that witnesses and statements are fine, but nothing beats empirical physical evidence. Actually it isn't a truism because most policemen think the word 'empirical' is something to do with Darth Vader, but it damn well should be.

A)ny working hypothesis was probably going to involve quantum theory at some point—the part of physics that made my brains trickle out of my ears.

One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

I saw nothing suspicious—which is unusual. A copper can usually find something suspicious if they look hard enough.

and I gave him the police stare. The aim of the stare is to convey cynicism combined with weary patience. I know you're about to lie to me but because I am a hugely magnanimous agent of state power, I'm willing to give you a moment to think better of it.

People are often short-sighted and stupid, right up to the point where they're fucking perceptive—that point usually being the most inconvenient moment possible.

Whatever you see, he'd said, take as long a look as you need to get used to it, to accept it, and then move on as if nothing has changed.

Leslie said that the capacity not to notice a traditional Dutch folk-dancing band walk up behind you was not a survival characteristic in the complex fast-paced world of the modern policing environment. I'd like to point out that I was trying to give directions to a slightly deaf tourist at the time and anyway it was a Swedish dance troupe.

It gave me "the eye"—the fearsome gaze that sheepdogs use to keep their charges in line. But I gave it "the look"—the stare that policemen use to keep members of the public in a state of randomized guilt.

Was your husband upset?' 'How can you tell with an Englishman?

You let them watch the Fassbender again,' I said to Victor 'Didn't you?

I surreptitiously checked to make sure she hadn't left the plates facing the wrong way again.

She was staring at us over the top of a pair of completely pointless sunglasses and her phone was playing what I now recognised as The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X-Ray Specs.

Street towards Covent Garden. There was