Quotes About Observation

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

Some people are weatherwise, and most are otherwise.

carefully combed and scented vulture waiting to swoop down from the side lines." Evening after evening between 6 o'clock and midnight he drifts in and out of the lobby, up and down Randolph Street and takes up his position at various points of vantage where crowds pass, where women pass. I've watched him. No one ever talks to him. There are no salutations. He is unknown and worse. For the women, the rouged and ornamental ones, know him a bit too well. They

Well, then I spent three days in the Field Museum, eyeing the exhibits. Can you beat it? I walk around and walk around rubbering at mummies and bones and—well, I ain't kiddin', but they was among the three most interesting days I ever put in.

For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries—to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.

To the distinguished female author's left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom.

I imagined the passengers could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down.

Whenever I walked across the Manhattan Bridge, I remembered myself as having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. This is because you can see the latter from the former, and the latter is more beautiful. [...] But by the time I arrived in Brooklyn to meet Alex, I was starting to misremember crossing in the third person, as if I had somehow watched myself walking beneath the Brooklyn Bridge's Aeolian cables.

Her breath smelled terrible and I told myself to commit that fact to memory, to remember it the next time I was intimidated by her unwavering grace.

Actually the only one of us who has been to Paraguay in the last thirty years is the Ambassador," said the receptionist, "and he's in Wales at the moment.

It was rumored that Sir Bernard could identify the cause of death simply by smelling a corpse. In 1938, the Washington Post hailed him as "England's modern Sherlock Holmes.

human behaviour, if scrutinized sufficiently intensely, can begin to seem suspicious:

Everyone always says, 'Don't you want to see the baby, don't you want to see the baby,' but if I did want to see a fat, bald, confused person, obviously I'd have only to look in the mirror.

Her eyes were narrowed as if they were endlessly trying to exclude most of what they saw.

You're looking at me, chair,' he said. 'You don't want me to sit on you, eh, because I fell in mud, isn't that correct?' The chair said nothing.

If they are awake while everyone else was sleeping, what on earth were they doing?

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

I asked for daily reports on developments at major financial firms and,

Don recommended that we wait and see what private-sector solutions might emerge,

sat to my left.

The idea was watch what I do, not what I say.

The president tried to pretend that he didn't notice, but before long he burst out laughing.

Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?

In examining the history of cities, I looked for material in markets, souks and bazaars; in swimming pools, stadiums and parks; in street-food stalls, coffee houses and cafés; in shops, malls and department stores. I interrogated paintings, novels, films and songs as much as official records in search of the lived experience of cities and the intensity of their daily life.