Quotes About Observation

I've seen that look on cabinet ministers," Merton observed quietly. "When they were stuffed full of too many secrets.

People don't respond to what you tell them; they respond to what you show them.

From Woody's Restaurant, Middlebury Today, noon, a young macho friendly waiter and three diners, business types—two males, one female— are in a quandary about the name of the duck paddling Otter Creek, the duck being brown, but too large to be a female mallard. They really want to know, and I'm the human-watcher behind the nook of my table, camouflaged by my stillness and nonchalant plumage. They really want to know. This sighting I record in the back of my Field Guide to People.

Looking down the road that runs along the bluff, I spy a solitary figure in the rain. The Turning Angel.

Reality abides in the eyes.

At least fifty people are sitting or standing within sight of me. The oldest ones sit on their stoops beneath dented metal awnings. The middle-aged stand in little knots, the men sharing bottles wrapped in paper sacks, the women holding babies. I don't see any teenagers—it's as though they've been drafted for some special war—but several toddlers walk unsupervised through the parking lot. Three of them are naked.

lot. She saw a guy carrying a small suitcase out

The world can be seen from so many different angles. Each of us is born seeing the world in a different way, and each moment we live shapes our eyes and hearts differently.

Doppler effect.

If you knew exactly where that moving object was, at any given moment, wouldn't that tell you the exact location of the observer on the ground?

They are descriptions of what real life looks like, not prescriptions for how to get life.

Right. Isn't that how science works?" Redwing grinned. "If you don't understand, do an experiment.

If the all-powerful observer measured a particle and found it at position x, then the particle had to be given a small push by the observer, in the very act of observing. That was Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. You could not tell precisely how much of a push the observer had given the wretched particle, so its future position was somewhat uncertain.

There was a thin chain to thinking, he realized, which began with seeing something noticeable, which in time made you see something that wasn't apparent, which finally made you see something that wasn't even visible—if you were doing it right.

metaphorically, Mr. Winterbourne.

Ah, to be able to read both the surface and that which is below the surface!

I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it's the other way around.

Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it's the other way around.

I sat near enough to hear the happiness, but far enough away not to feel it.

He looked back at the house and at all the buildings around it, searching for landmarks that would fix the place in his mental map.

The first rule of black business everywhere is: never let anyone know what you're thinking. Didier's corollary to the rule was: always know what others think of you.

in the centre of six hundred stares and whispers

As we walked, it occurred to me that the slum had been strangely devoid of pariah dogs. I noticed that there were none visible anywhere on the streets.

I knew, I was certain somehow, that wanting my little house to be bigger or brighter or grander than it was had been in my mind, not hers. She wasn't judging. She was only looking, seeing everything, even what I felt.