Quotes About Observation

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.

I looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies—for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips.

Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness & devours views from windows (stories, movies, overheard talk &sights in the street, pictures in newspapers, etc.) with continuous feeling she is 'just about', miraculously, to come into her own her own life

Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.

While he kissed me I kept my eyes open and tried to memorize the spacing of the house lights so I would never forget them.

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations... I certainly learned a lot of things this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception.

I counted the letters. There were exactly a hundred of them. I thought this must be important.

If I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.

The photographer fiddled with his hot white lights. 'Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.' I stared through the frieze of rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee's window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if, when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it.

Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

I was more conscious of being stared at on the balcony than of the typewriter in front of me. Now

His big, pleasant, ugly black-clad wife, very broad-beamed, came out. Said she also milked goats; described frisky games of little kid with hand motions. Moon brightening through clouds as we left, clear-cut pine tree jagged against sky. Man happy, own world, out of earth; brother kept three cows on hill beyond railroad station. Left feeling good day; light yellow-green eyes of goats.

Blameless as daylight I stood looking At

See each scene deep, love it like a complex faceted jewel. Get the light, shadow & vivid color. Set scene the night before. Sleep on it, write it in the morning.

I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren't called Smith. Anyhow

I must write about the things of the world with no glazing." She fought doggedly against the great suction into her own subjectivity: "I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself." Something like this went through nearly every entry in her journal over long periods. In

We walk on air, Watson. There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorus. There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.

There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Lo que oyes lo olvidas, lo que ves lo recuerdas, lo que haces lo entiendes».

What you hear, you forget; what you see, you remember; what you do, you understand.

Watch yourself, become conscious, observe your thoughts, your fears, your beliefs, your habits, your actions, and even your inactions. Put yourself under a microscope. Study yourself.