Quotes About Observation

I was hooked on writing. I mean, where else can you get paid for sticking your nose into somebody else's business?

us, not with her,' she observed.

I like the country, too, she agreed. Look! Did you see that bird swoop across the yard? That bird was a bat, Aunt Clare said. She chuckled as both birds ducked their heads.

My, Juanita, you're getting to be a big girl. How old are you? I can't keep track.

That girl has been bad again," Ramona heard the four-year-old next door say to her little sister.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. I am constantly filled with wonder at the number of things that other people do without any evident difficulty that are pretty much beyond me.

Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

There's something satisfying, I think,' Evans said, 'about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.

I stood in a Burger King and studied, with absorption, the photographs of the manager and his executive crew (reflecting on the curious fact that people who go into hamburger management always look as if their mother slept with Goofy)

If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it.

as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose." The

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento.

In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute but relative both to the observer and the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects will become. We can never accelerate ourselves to the speed of light, and the harder we try(the faster we go) the more distorted we become, relative to an outside observer.

Here are instructions for being a pigeon: (1) Walk around aimlessly for a while, pecking at cigarette butts and other inappropriate items. (2) Take fright at someone walking along the platform and fly off to a girder. (3) Have a shit. (4) Repeat.

Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake.

Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can't quite decide which is the more amazing – the fact or the thinking of it.

Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit

Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon's craters were indeed formed by impacts—in itself quite a radical notion for the time—but

Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia's wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.

There's something satisfying, I think," Evans said, "about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it.