Quotes About Observation

Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.

You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.

A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

For scientists, reality is not optional.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.

We cannot jump to conclusions. All we can do is measure and count. That is the task of science.

If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.

In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.

In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn't recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.

Roscoe and his friends are studying the heat of the fire and the level of oil in the pot with the attitude men take on occasions like this, feeling the weight of their supervisory powers. Sugar smiles. A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once.

How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble? Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. ...

I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.

But I kept my mouth shut. It's safer knowing more about people than they know about you.

I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.)

Tommy, though. Smart as hell, he could think himself out of any hole, but then would crawl back into it and sit there. It was like he chose the shit end of the stick, so nobody else would get it. A hard thing to watch.

The eye sees what it cares enough to see.

Mother says I never practiced anything but always watched Leah, letting her make the mistakes for both of us, until I was ready to do it myself with acceptable precision. Mother is kind to me, probably because I've stayed nearer at hand than her other children. But I disagree. I made plenty of my own mistakes. I just made them on the inside.

regular Niagara of blond highlights was Crystal, sitting alone with her breakfast, gazing at it with such earnest focus, you'd think she was on a first date with that Pepsi and glazed doughnut.

How could anyone get a sensible bearing on life from the stage of an auditorium, or make any useful statements from that position?